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AM NOT GOD 


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VOLUME XVI 
NUMBER 2 


OCTOBER 
1935 


A STREET & SMITH PUBLICATION 


The entire contents of this magazine are protected by copyright, and must not be reprinted without the publishers’ permission, 


Table of Contents 


Feature Serial Novel: 


I AM NOT GOD (Part I) . . Nat Schachner . 64 
Interpreting an age-old problem through the medium of gases which 


encompass the earth from outer space. 
Novelettes: 
NIGHT Don A. Stuart. 8 


The long-awaited sequel to “Twilight” —pushing ahead into the eterna! 
night when mankind sleeps 
THE PLANET OF DOUBT. ‘ . Stanley G. Weinbaum . 106 
A new story of the strange planet in which science is almost-——but 
not quite—left without its desired data. 
THE WAY OF THE EARTH a . David R. Daniels . +, lon 
He was a rebel—uwith everything to gain and nothing to lose—so he 
laughed and ventured into the unknown. 


Short Stories: 
DERELICT F P . Raymond Z. Gallun . 23 


All discovery is not confined to “the planets. Here is a gripping 
reminder of tragedy in the spaceways. 


INTRA-PLANETARY . ‘ . Chan Corbett o< oe 


A novel presentation of the planetary conception—with a thought 
behind it for ali of us. 


A PRINCESS OF PALLIS . Clifton B. Kruse . . 
Stowaways aboard—and a freighter trailing. It meant trouble 
FACETED EYES . ° . Eh. Rese . 127 


Biological caperimentation leads to sports which, because of adaptive 
powers, are deadly. 


PHANTOM STAR ‘ . J. Harvey Haggard . 132 


A story of vengeance aboard a sky liner whercin a ship plunges into 


a star. 
Serial Novel: 
ISLANDS OF THE SUN (Conclusion) . Jack Williamson . 33 
Concluding a new pints te. the origin of our galary—and 
of li 


Readers’ Department: 
BRASS TACKS (The Open House of Controversy) . e - 154 
EDITOR’S PAGE . ; ° . « aoe 
Cover Painting ‘ly Howard v. Brown 


Story illustrations by Elliott Dold, Jr., M. Marchioni,; 
and C. R. Thomson : 


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George C. Smith, Jr., President; Ormond V. Gould, Vice President and Treasurer; Artemas Holmes, Vice ‘President 
and Secretary; Rides C. Vernam, Vice President. Copyright, 1935, by Street ‘& Smith Publications, Inc., New 
ork. Copyright, 1935, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., Great Britain. Entered as Second- class Matter 
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axe 


ONDON was staring through the 
> glasses with a face tense and 

drawn, all his attention utterly 
concentrated on that one almost in- 
visible speck infinitely far up in the 
blue sky, and saying over and over again 
in the most horribly absent-minded way, 


“My Lord—my Lord 


ae 
" Stuart 


shivered 
down at me, sheer agony in his face. 


Suddenly he and looked 


“He’s never coming down. Don, he’s 
never coming down s 

I knew it, too—knew it as solidly as 
I knew the knewledge was impossible. 
But I smiled and said: “Oh, I wouldn’t 
say that. If anything, I’d fear his com- 


ing down. What goes up comes down.” 

Major Condon trembled all over. His 
mouth worked horribly for a moment 
before he could speak. “Talbot—I’m 
scared—lI’m horribly scared. You know 
—you’re his assistant—you know he’s 
trying to defeat gravity. Men aren’t 
meant to—it’s wrong—wrong 
His eyes were glued on those binocu- 


The machines were far beyond anything ever 
conceived—machines of perfection. 


lars again, with the same terrible tensity, 
and now he was saying over and over in 
that absent-minded way, “wrong— 
wrong—wrong 4 

Simultaneously he stiffened, and 
stopped. The dozen or so other men 
standing on that lonely little emergency 
field stiffened ; then the major crumpled 
to the ground. I’ve never before seen 


10 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


a man faint, let alone an army officer 
with a D. S. medal. I didn’t stop to 
help him, because I knew something had 
happened. [| grabbed the glasses. 

Far, far up in the sky was that little 
orange speck—far, where there is almost 
no air, and he had been forced to wear 
a stratosphere suit with a little alcohol 
heater. The broad, orange wings were 
overlaid now with a faint-glowing, pearl- 
gray light. And it was falling. Slowly, 
at first, circling aimlessly downward. 
Then it dipped, rose, and somehow went 
into a tail spin. 

It was horrible. I know I must have 
breathed, but it didn’t seem so. It took 
minutes for it to fall those miles, despite 
the speed. Eventually it whipped out of 
that tail spin—through sheer speed, 
whipped out and into a power dive. It 
was a ghastly, flying coffin, hurtling at 
more than half a thousand miles an 
hour when it reached the Earth, some 
fifteen miles away. 

The ground trembled, and the air 
shook with the crash of it. We were 
in the cars and roaring across the ground 
long before it hit. I was in Bob’s car, 
with Jeff, his laboratory technician— 
Bob’s little roadster he’d never need 
again. The engine picked up quickly, 
and we were going seventy before we 
left the field, jumped a shallow ditch and 
hit the road—the deserted, concrete road 
that led off toward where he must be. 
The engine roared as Jeff clamped down 
on the accelerator. Dimly, I heard the 
major’s big car coming along behind us. 

Jeff drove like a maniac, but I didn’t 
notice. I knew the thing had done 
ninety-five but I think we must have 
done more. The wind whipped tears in 
my eyes so I couldn’t be sure whether I 
saw mounting smoke and flame or not. 
With Diesel fuel there shouldn’t be— 
but that plane had been doing things it 
shouldn’t. It had been trying out 
Carter’s antigravity coil. 

We shot up the flat, straight road 
across wide, level country, the wind 


moaning a requiem about the car. Far 
ahead I saw the side road that must 
lead off toward where Bob should be, 
and lurched to the braking of the car, 
the whine and sing of violently shrieking 
tires, then to the skidding corner. It 
was a sand road; we slithered down it 
and for all the lightness and power, we 
slowed to sixty-five, clinging to the seat 
as the soft sand gripped and clung. 
Violently Jeff twisted into a branch- 
ing cow path, and somehow the springs 
took it. We braked to a stop a quarter 


of a mile from the plane. 


IT WAS in a fenced field of pasture 
and wood lot. We leaped the fence, and 
raced toward it; Jeff got there first, just 
as the major’s car shrieked to a stop 
behind ours. 

The major was cold and pale when he 
reached us. “Dead,” he stated. 

And I was very much colder and prob- 
ably several times as pale.~ “I don’t 
know!” I moaned. “He isn’t there!” 

“Not there!” The major almost 
screamed it. “He must be—he has to 
be. He had no parachute—wouldn’t 
take one. They say he didn’t jump——” 

I pointed to the plane, and wiped a 
little cold sweat from my forehead. I 
felt clammy all over, and my spine 
prickled. The solid steel of the huge 
Diesel engine was driven through the 
stump of a tree, down into the ground 
perhaps eight or nine feet, and the dirt 
and rock had splashed under that blow 
like wet mud. 

The wings were on the other side of 
the field, flattened, twisted straws of 
dural alloy. The fuselage of the ship 
was a perfect silhouette—a longitudinal 
projection that had flattened in on itself, 
each separate section stopping only as it 
hit the ground. 

The great torus coil with its strangely 
twined wrappings of hair-fine bismuth 
wire was intact! And bent over it, 
twisted, utterly wrecked by the impact, 
was the main-wing stringer—the great 


NIGHT ii 


dural-alloy beam that. supported most 
of the ship’s weight in the air. It was 
battered, crushed on those hair-fine, 
fragile bismuth wires—and not one of 
them was twisted or displaced or so 
much as skinned. The back frame of 
the ponderous Diesel engine—the heavy 
supercharger was the anvil of that com- 
bination—was cracked and splintered. 
And not one wire of the hellish bismuth 
coil was strained or skinned or displaced. 

And the red pulp that should have 
been there—the red pulp that had been 
a man—wasn’t. It simply wasn’t there 
at all. He hadn’t left the plane. In the 
clear, cloudless air, we could see that. 
He was gone. 

We examined it, of course. A farmer 
came, and another, and looked, and 
talked. Then several farmers came in 
old, dilapidated cars with their wives and 
families, and watched. 

We set the owner of the property on 
watch and went away—went back to the 
city for workmen and a truck with a 
derrick. Dusk was falling. It would 
be morning before we could do anything, 
so we went away. 


Five of us—the major of the army 
air force, Jeff Rodney, the two Douglass 
Co. men whose names I never remem- 
bered and I—sat in my—our—room. 


Bob's and Jeff’s and mine. We'd been 
sitting there for hours trying to talk, 
trying tc think, trying to remember 
every little detail, and trying to forget 
every ghastly detail. We couldn’t re- 
member the detail that explained it, nor 
forget the details that rode and harried 
us. 

And the telephone rang. I started. 
Then slowly got up and answered. A 
strange voice, flat and rather unpleasant, 
said: “Mr. Talbot?” 

“Yes.” 

It was Sam Gantry, the farmer we’d 
left on watch. “There’s a man here.” 

“Yes? What does he want?” 


“T dunno. I dunno where he came 
from. He's either dead or out cold. 
Gotta funny kind of an aviator suit on, 
with a glass face on it. He looks all 
blue, so I guess he’s dead.” 

“Lord! Bob! Did you take that 
helmet off?” I roared. 

“No, sir, no—no, sir. 
him the way he was.” 

“His tanks have run out. Listen. 
Take a hammer, a wrench, anything, and 
break that glass faceplate! Quick! 
We'll be there.” 

Jeff was moving. The major was, 
too, and the others. I made a grab for 
the half-empty bottle of Scotch, started 
out, and ducked back into the closet. 
With the oxygen bottle under my arm 
I jumped into the crowded little road- 
ster just as Jeff started it moving. He 
turned on the horn, and left it that way. 

We dodged, twisted, jumped and 
stopped with jerks in traffic, then leaped 
into smooth, roaring speed out toward 
the farmer’s field. The turns were 
familiar now; we scarcely slowed for 
them, sluing around them. This time 
Jeff charged through the wire fence. A 
headlight popped; there was a shrill 
scream of wire, the wicked zing of wire 
scratching across the hood and mud 
guards, and we were bouncing across the 
field. 


We just left 


THERE WERE two lanterns on the 
ground ; three men carried others ; more 
men squatted down beside a still figure 
garbed in a fantastic, bulging, airproof 
stratosphere suit. They looked at us, 
open-mouthed as we skidded to a halt, 
moving aside as the major leaped out 
and dashed over with the Scotch. I 
followed close behind with the oxygen 
bottle. 

Bob’s faceplate was shattered, his face 
blue, his lips blue and flecked with froth. 
A long gash across his cheek from the 
shattered glass bled slowly. The major 
lifted his head without a word, and 


12 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


glass tinkled inside the helmet as he 
tried to force a little whisky down his 
throat. 

“Wait!” I called. “Major, give him 
artificial respiration, and this will bring 
him arcund quicker—better.” The 
major nodded, and rose, rubbing his 
arm with a peculiar expression. 

“That’s cold!” he said, as he flipped 
Bob over, and straddled his back. I 
held the oxygen bottle under Bob’s nose 
as the major swung back in his arc, and 
let the raw, cold oxygen gas flow into 
his nostrils. 

In ten seconds Bob coughed, gurgled, 
coughed violently, and took a deep 
shuddering breath. His face turned pink 
almost instantly under that lungful of 
oxygen, and I noticed with some sur- 
prise that he seemed to exhale almost 
nothing, his body absorbing the oxygen 
rapidly. 

He coughed again; then: “I could 
breathe a heck of a sight better if you'd 
get off my back,” he said. The major 


jumped up, and Bob turned over and 


sat up. He waved me aside, and spat. 
“I’m—all right,” he said softly. 

“Lord, man, what happened?” de- 
manded the major. 

30b sat silent for a minute. His eyes 
had the strangest look—a hungry look— 
as he gazed about him. He looked at 
the trees beyond and at the silent, 
watching men in the light of the lan- 
terns; then up, up to where a myriad 
stars gleamed and danced and flickered 
in the clear night sky. 

“T’m back,” he said softly. Then sud- 
denly he shivered, and looked horribly 
afraid. ‘“But—I’ll have to be—then— 
too.” 

He looked at the major for a minute, 
and smiled faintly. And at the two 
Douglass Co. men. “Your plane was 
all right. I started up on the wings, as 
arranged, went way up, till I thought 
surely I was at a safe height, where the 
air wasn’t too dense and the field surely 
wouldn’t reach to Earth—Lord !—reach 


to Earth! I didn’t guess how far that 
field extended. It touched Earth— 
twice. 

“T was at forty-five thousand when I 
decided it was safe, and cut the engine. 
It died, and the stillness shocked me. It 
was so quiet. So quiet. 

“T turned on the coil circuit, and the 
dynamotor began to hum as the tubes 
warmed up. And then—the field hit 
me. It paralyzed me in an instant. I 
never had a chance to break the circuit, 
though I knew instantly something was 
wrong—terribly wrong. But the very 
first thing it did was to paralyze me, and 
I had to sit there and watch the instru- 
ments climb to positions and meanings 
they were never meant for. 

“T realized I alone was being affected 
by that coil—I alone, sitting directly 
over it. I stared at the meters and they 
began to fade, began to seem trans- 
parent, unreal. And as they faded into 
blankness I saw clear sky beyond them; 
then for a hundredth of a second, like 
some effect of persistence of vision, | 
thought I saw the plane falling. twisting 
down at incredible speed, and the light 
faded as the Sun seemed to rocket sud- 
denly across the sky and vanish. 

“T don’t know how long I was in that 
paralyzed condition, where there was 
only blankness—neither dark nor light, 
nor time nor any form—but I breathed 
many times. Finally, form crawled and 
writhed into the blankness, and seemed 
to solidify beneath me as, abruptly, the 
blankness gave way to a dull red light. 
I was falling. 

“T thought instantly of the forty-five 
thousand feet that lay between me and 
the solid Earth, and stiffened automati- 
cally in terror. And in the same instant 
I landed in a deep blanket of white 
snow, stained by the red light that 
lighted the world. 


“COLD. Cold—it tore into me like 
the fang of a savage animal. What 


NIGHT 13 


cold! The cold of ultimate death. It 
ripped through that thick, insulated suit 
and slashed at me viciously, as though 
there were no insulation there. I shiv- 
ered so violently I could scarcely turn 
up the alcohol valves. You know I car- 
ried alcohol tanks and catalyst grids for 
heating, because the only electric fields 
I wanted were those of the apparatus. 
Even used a Diesel instead of gas 
engine. 

“I thank the Lord for that then. I 
realized that whatever had happened I 
was in a spot indescribably cold and 
desolate. And in the same instant, rea- 
lized that the sky was black. Blacker 
than the blackest night, and yet before 
me the snow field stretched to infinity, 
tainted by the blood-red light, and my 
shadow crawled in darker red at my feet. 

“I turned around. As far as the eye 
could see in three directions the land 
swept off in very low, very slightly roll- 
ing hills, almost plains—red plains of 
snow dyed with the dripping light of 
sunset. I thought. 

“In the fourth direction, a wall—a 
wall that put the Great Wall of China 
to shame—loomed up half a mile—a 
blood-red wall that had the luster of 
metal. It stretched across the horizon, 
and looked a scant hundred yards away, 
for the air was utterly clear. I turned 
up my alcohol burners a bit more and 
felt a little better. 

“Something jerked my head around 
like a giant hand—a sudden thought. I 
stared at the Sun and gulped. It was 
four times—six times—the size of the 
Sun I knew. And it wasn’t setting. It 
was forty-five degrees from the horizon. 
It was red. Blood-red. And there 
wasn’t the slightest bit of radiant heat 
reaching my face from it. That Sun 
was cold. 


“T’d just automatically assumed I was 
still on Earth, whatever else might have 
happened, but now I knew I couldn’t be. 
It must be another planet of another sun 


—a frozen planet—for that snow was 
frozen air. I knew it absolutely. A 
frozen planet of a dead sun. 

“And then I changed even that. I 
looked up at the black sky above me, and 
in all the vast black bow! of the heavens, 
not three-score stars were visible. Dim, 
red stars, with one single sun that stood 
out for its brilliance—a yellowish-red 
sun perhaps a tenth as bright as our 
Sun, but a monster here. It was another 
—a dead—space. For if that snow was 
frozen air, the only atmosphere must 
have been neon and helium. There 
wasn't any hazy air to stop the light of 
the stars, and that dim, red sun didn’t 
obscure them with its light. The stars 
were gone. 

“In that glimpse, my mind began 
working by itself; I was scared. 

“Scared? I was so scared I was 
afraid I was going to be sick. Because 
right then I knew I was never coming 
back. When I felt that cold, I’d won- 
dered when my oxygen bottles would 
give out, if I’d get back before they did. 
Now it was not a worry. It was simply 
the limiting factor on an already- 
determined thing, the setting on the time 
bomb. had just so much more time 
before I died right there. 

“My mind was working out things, 
working them out all by itself, and giv- 
ing answers I didn’t want, didn’t want 
to know about. For some reason it per- 
sisted in considering this was Earth, and 
the conviction became more and more 
fixed. It was right. That was Earth. 
And it was old Sol. Old—old Sol. It 
was the time axis that coil distorted— 
not gravity at all. My mind worked that 
out with a logic as cold as that planet. 

“If it was time it had distorted, and 
this was Earth, then it had distorted 
time beyond imagining to an extent as 
meaningless to our minds as the distance 
a hundred million light years is. It was 
simply vast—incalculable. The Sun 
was dead. The Earth was dead. And 


14 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


Earth was already, in our time, two bil- 
lions of years old, and in all that geo- 
logical time, the Sun had not changed 
measurably. Then how long was it 
since my time? The Sun was dead. The 
very stars were dead. It must have 
been, I thought even then, billions on 
billions of years. And I grossly under- 
estimated it. 

“The world was old—old—old. The 
very rocks and ground radiated a crush- 
ing aura of incredible age. It was old, 
older than—but what is there? Older 
than the hills? Hills? Gosh, they'd 
been born and died and been born and 
worn away again, a million, a score of 
million times! Old as the stars? No, 
that wouldn’t do. The stars were dead 
—then. 


“T looked again at the metal wall, and 
set out for it, and the aura of age washed 
up at me, and dragged at me, and tried 
to stop this motion when all motion 
should have ceased. And the thin, un- 
utterably cold wind whined in dead pro- 


est at me, and pulled at me with the 
ghost hands of the million million mil- 
lion that had been born and lived and 
died in the countless ages before I was 
born. 

“T wondered as I went. I didn’t think 
clearly ; for the dead aura of the dead 
planet pulled at me. Age. The stars 
were dying, dead. They were huddled 
there in space, like decrepit old men, 
huddling for warmth. The galaxy was 
shrunk. So tiny, it wasn’t a thousand 
light years across, the stars were sepa- 
rated by miles where there had been 
light years. The magnificent, proudly 
sprawling universe I had known, that 
flung itself across a million million light 
years, that flung radiant energy through 
space by the millions of millions of tons 
was—gone. 

“Tt was dying—a dying miser that 
hoarded its last broken dregs of energy 
in a tiny cramped space. It was broken 
and shattered. A thousand billion years 


before the cosmical constant had been 
dropped from that broken universe. The 
cosmical constant that flung giant gal- 
axies whirling apart with ever greater 
speed had no place here. It had hurled 
the universe in broken fragments, till 
each spattered bit felt the chill of lone- 
liness, and wrapped space about itself, 
to become a universe in itself while the 
flaming galaxies vanished. 


“THAT had happened so long ago 
that the writing it had left in the fabric 
of space itself had worn away. Only 
the gravity constant remained, the 
hoarding constant, that drew things to- 
gether, and slowly the galaxy collapsed, 
shrunken and old, a withered mummy. 

“The very atoms were dead. The 
light was cold; even the red light made 
things look older, colder. There was no 
youth in the universe. I didn’t belong, 
and the faint protesting rustle of the 
infinitely cold wind about me moved the 
snow in muted, futile protest, resenting 
my intrusion from a time when things 
were young. It whinnied at me feebly, 
and chilied the youth of me. 

“T plodded on and on, and always the 
metal wall retreated, like one of those 
desert mirages. I was too stupefied by 
the age of the thing to wonder; I just 
walked on. 

“T was getting nearer, though. The 
wall was real; it was fixed. As I drew 
slowly nearer, the polished sheen of the 
wall died and the last dregs of hope died. 
I’d thought there might be some one 
still living behind that wall. Beings who 
could build such a thing might be able 
to live even here. But I couldn't stop 
then; I just went on. The wall was 
broken and cracked. It wasn’t a wall I'd 
seen; it was a series of broken walls, 
knitted by distance to a smooth front. 

“There was no weather to age them, 
only the faintest stirring of faint, dead 
winds—winds of neon and helium, inert 
and uncorroding—as dead and inert as 


NIGHT 15 


the universe. The city had been dead a 
score of billions of years. That city 
was dead for a time ten times longer 
than the age of our planet to-day. But 
nothing destroyed it. Earth was dead 
—too dead to suffer the racking pains 
of life. The air was dead, too dead to 
scrape away metal. 

“But the universe itself was dead. 
There was no cosmic radiation then to 
finally level the walls by atomic disinte- 
gration. There had been a wall—a single 
metal wall. Something—perhaps a last 
wandering meteor—had chanced on it 
in a time incalculably remote, and broken 
it. I entered through the great gap. 
Snow covered the city—soft, white 
snow. The great red sun stool still 
just where it was. Earth’s restless rota- 
tion had long since been stilled—long, 
long since. 

“There were dead gardens above, and 
I wandered up to them. That was 
really what convinced me it was a human 
city,on Earth. There were frozen, hud- 
dled heaps that might once have been 
men. Little fellows with fear forever 
frozen on their faces huddled helplessly 
over something that must once have been 
a heating device. Dead perhaps, since 
the last storm old Earth had known, 
tens of billions of years before. 

“I went down. There were vastnesses 
in that city. It was huge. It stretched 
forever, it seemed, on and on, in its 
deadness. Machines, machines every- 
where. And the machines were dead, 
too. I went down, down where I 
thought a bit of light and heat might 
linger. I didn’t know then how long 
death had been there; those corpses 


looked so fresh, preserved by the eternal 
cold. 


“It grew dark down below, and only 
through rents and breaks did that bloody 


light seep in. Down and down, till I 
was below the level of the dead surface. 
The white snow persisted, and then I 
came to the cause of that final, sudden 


death. I could understand then. More 
and more I had puzzled, for those 
machines I’d seen I knew were far and 
beyond anything we ever conceived— 
machines of perfection, self-repairing, 
and self-energizing, self-perpetuating. 
They could make duplicates of them- 
selves, and duplicate other, needed 
machines; they were intended to be 
eternal, everlasting. 

“But the designers couldn’t cope with 
some things that were beyond even their 
majestic imaginations—the imaginations 
that conceived these cities that had lived 
beyond—a million times beyond—what 
they had dreamed. They must have 
conceived some vague future. But not 
a future when the Earth died, and the 
Sun died, and even the universe itself 
died. 

“Cold had killed them. They had 
heating arrangements, devices intended 
to maintain forever the normal tem- 
perature despite the wildest variations 
of the weather. But in every electrical 
machine, resistances, balance resistances, 
and induction coils, balance condensers, 
and other inductances. And cold, stark, 
spatial cold, through ages, threw them 
off. Despite the heaters, cold crept in 
colder—cold that made their resistance 
balances and their induction coils super- 
conductors! That destroyed the city. 
Superconduction—like the elimination 
of friction, on which all things must 
rest. It is a drag and a thing engineers 
fight forever. Resistance and friction 
must finally be the rest and the base of 
all things, the force that holds the great 
bed bolts firm and the brakes that stop 
the machines when needed. 

“Electrical resistance died in the cold 
and the wonderful machines stopped for 
the replacement of defective parts. And 
when they were replaced, they, too, were 
defective. For what months must that 
constant stop—replacement—start—stop 
—replacement have gone on before, at 
last defeated forever, those vast ma- 
chines must bow in surrender to the in- 


16 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


evitable? Cold had defeated them by 
defeating and removing the greatest 
obstacle of the engineers that built them 
—resistance. 

“They must have struggled forever 
—as we would say—through a hundred 
billion years against encroaching harsh- 
ness of nature, forever replacing worn, 
defective parts. At last, defeated for- 
ever, the great power plants, fed by 
dying atoms, had been forced into 
eternal idleness and cold. Cold con- 
quered them at last. 

“They didn’t blow up. Nowhere did 
I see a wrecked machine; always they 
had stopped automatically when the de- 
fective resistances made it impossible 
to continue. The stored energy that 
was meant to re-start those machines 
after repairs had been made had long 
since leaked out. Never again could 
they move, I knew. 


“T WONDERED how long they had 
been, how long they had gone on and 


on, long after the human need of them 


had vanished. For that vast city con- 
tained only a very few humans at the 
end. What untold ages of lonely func- 
tioning perfection had stretched behind 
those at-last-defeated mechanisms? 

“T wandered out, to see perhaps more, 
before the necessary end came to me, 
too. Through the city of death. Every- 
where little self-contained machines, 
cleaning machines that had kept that 
perfect city orderly and neat stood help- 
less and crushed by eternity and cold. 
They must have continued functioning 
for years after the great central power 
stations failed, for each contained its 
own store of energy, needing only occa- 
sional recharge from the central sta- 
tions. 

“T could see where breaks had oc- 
curred in the city, and, clustered about 
those breaks were motionless repair ma- 
chines, their mechanisms in positions of 
work, the débris cleared away and care- 


fully stacked on motionless trucks. The 
new beams and plates were partly at- 
tached, partly fixed and left, as the 
last dregs of their energy was fruitlessly 
expended in the last, dying attempts of 
that great body to repair itself. The 
death wounds lay unmended. 

“T started back up. Up to the top 
of the city. It was a long climb, an 
infinite, weary climb, up half a mile of 
winding ramps, past deserted, dead 
homes; past, here and there, shops and 
restaurants; past motionless little au- 
tomative passenger cars. 

“Up and up, to the crowning gardens 
that lay stiff and brittle and frozen. The 
breaking of the roof must have caused 
a sudden chill, for their leaves lay green 
in sheaths of white, frozen air. Brittle 
glass, green and perfect to the touch. 
Flowers, blooming in wonderful per- 
fection showed still; they didn’t seem 
dead, but it didn’t seem they could be 
otherwise under the blanket of cold. 

“Did you ever sit up with a corpse?” 
Bob looked up at us—through us. “I 
had to once, in my little home town 
where they always did that. I sat with 
a few neighbors while the man died be- 
fore my eyes. I knew he must die when 
I came there. He.died—and I sat there 
all night while the neighbors filed out, 
one by one, and the quiet settled. The 
quiet of the dead. 

“T had to again. I was sitting with 
a corpse then. The corpse of a dead 
world in a dead universe, and the quiet 
didn’t have to settle there; it had settled 
a billion years ago, and only my coming 
had stirred those feeble, protesting 
ghosts of eon-dead hopes of that planet 
to softly whining protest—protest the 
wind tried to sob to me, the dead wind 
of the dead gases. I'll never be able 
to call them inert gases again. I know. 
I know they are dead gases, the. dead 
gases of dead worlds. 

“And above, through the cracked 
crystal of the rook, the dying suns 

AST—1 


eS Se i le ee od 


NIGHT 17 


looked down on the dead city. I couldn’t 
stay there. I went down. Down under 
layer after layer of buildings, buildings 
of gleaming metal that reflected the dim, 
blood light of the Sun outside in car- 
mine stains. I went down and down, 
down to the machines again. But even 
there hopelessness seemed more intense. 
Again I saw that agonizing struggle of 
the eternally faithful machines trying to 
repair themselves once more to serve 
the masters who were dead a million 
million years. I could see it again in 
the frozen, exhausted postures of the 
repair machines, stilled forever in their 
hopeless endeavors, the last poor dregs 
of energy spilled in fruitless conflict 
with time. 

“It mattered little. Time himself was 
dying now, dying with the city and the 
planet and the universe he had killed. 

“But those machines had tried so hard 
to serve again—and failed. Now they 
could never try again. Even they—the 
deathless machines—were dead. 

“I went out again, away from those 
machines, out into the illimitable corri- 
dors, on the edge of the city. I could 
not penetrate far before the darkness 
became as absolute as the cold. I 
passed the shops where goods, un- 
touched by time in this cold, still beck- 
oned those strange humans, but humans 
for all that ; beckoned the masters of the 
machines that were no more. I vaguely 
entered one to see what manner of 
things they used in that time. 

“I nearly screamed at the motion of 
the thing in there, heard dimly through 
my suit the strangely softened sounds it 
made in the thin air. I watched it stag- 
ger twice—and topple. I cannot guess 
what manner of storage cells they had 
—save that they were marvelous beyond 
imagination. That stored energy that 
somehow I had released by entering was 
some last dreg that had remained 
through a time as old as our planet now. 
Its voice was stilled forever. But it 
drove me out—on. 


AST—2 


“It had died while I watched. But 
somehow it made me more curious. I 
wondered again, less oppressed by utter 
death. Still, some untapped energy re- 
mained in this place, stored unimagin- 
ably. I looked more keenly, watched 
more closely. And when I saw a screen 
in one office, I wondered. It was a 
screen. I could see readily it was tele- 
vision of some type. Exploratively, I 
touched a stud. Sound! A humming, 
soft sound! 

“To my mind leaped a picture of a 
system of these. There must be—inter- 
connected—a vast central office some- 
where with vaster accumulator cells, so 
huge, so tremendous in their power once, 
that even the little microfraction that 
remained was great. A storage system 
untouchable to the repair machines— 
the helpless, hopeless power machines. 


“IN AN INSTANT I was alive 
again with hope. There was a strange 
series of studs and dials, unknown de- 
vices. I pulled back on the stud I had 
pressed, and stood trembling, wonder- 
ing. Was there hope? 

“Then the thought died. What hope? 
The city was dead. Not merely that. It 
had been dead, dead for untold time. 
Then the whole planet was dead. With 
whom might I connect? There were 
none on the whole planet, so what mat- 
tered it that there was a communication 
system. 

“T looked at the thing more blankly. 
Had there been—how could I interpret 
its multitudinous devices? There was 
a thing on one side that made me think 
of a telephone dial for some reason. A 
pointer over a metal sheet engraved with 
nine symbols in a circle under the arrow 
of the pointer. Now the pointer was 
over what was either the first or the last 
of these. 

“Clumsily, in these gloves, I fingered 
one of the little symbol buttons inlaid 
in the metal. There was an unexpected 


click, a light glowed on the screen, a 
lighted image! It was a simple pro- 
jection—but what a projection! A 
three-dimensional sphere floated, turning 
slowly before my eyes, turning majesti- 
cally. And I nearly fell as understand- 
ing flooded me abruptly. The pointer 
was a selector! The studs beneath the 
pointer I understood! Nine of them. 
One after the other I pressed, and nine 
spheres—each different—swam before 
me. 

“And right there I stopped and did 
some kard thinking. Nine spheres. 
Nine planets. Earth was shown first— 
a strange planet to me, but one I knew 
from the relative size and. the position 
of the pointer must be Earth—then, in 
order, the other eight. 

“Now—might there be life? Yes. 
In those nine worlds there might be, 
somewhere. 


“Where? Mercury—nearest the Sun? 
No, the Sun was too dead, too cold, even 
for warmth there. And Mercury was 
too small. I knew, even as I thought, 
that I’d have one good chance because 
whatever means they had for communi- 
cation wouldn’t work without tremen- 
dous power. If those incredible storage 
cells had the power for even one shot, 
they had no more. Somehow I guessed 
that this apparatus might incorporate no 
resistance whatever. Here would be 
only very high frequency alternating 
current, and only condensers and in- 
ductances would be used in it. Super- 
cooling didn’t bother them any. It im- 
proved them. Not like the immense 
direct-current power machinery. 

“But where to try? Jupiter? That 
was big. And then I saw what the solu- 
tion must be. Cold had ruined these 
machines, thrown them off by making 
them too-perfect conductors. Because 
they weren’t designed to defend them- 
selves against spatial cold. But the 
machines—if there were any—on Pluto 
for instance, must originally have been 


18 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


designed for just such conditions? 
There it had always been cold. There 
it always would be cold. 

“T looked at that thing with an in- 
tensity that should have driven my bare 
eyesight to Pluto. It was a hope. My 
only hope. But—how to‘signal Pluto? 
They could not understand! If there 
were any ‘they.’ 

“So I had to guess—and hope. Some- 
how, I knew, there must be some means 
of calling the intelligent attendant, that 
the user might get aid. There was a 
bank of little studs—twelve of them— 
with twelve symbols, each different, in 
the center of the panel, grouped in four 
rows of three. I guessed. Duodecimal 
system. 

“Talk. of the problems of inter- 
planetary communication! Was there 
ever such a one? The problem of an 
anachronism in the city of the dead on 
a dead planet, seeking life somewhere, 
somehow. 

“There were two studs, off by them- 
selves, separate from the twelve—one 
green, one red. Again I guessed. Each 
of these had a compiex series of symbols 
on it, so I turned the pointer on the 
right to Pluto, wavered, and turned it to 
Neptune. Piuto was farther. Neptune 
had been cold enough; the machines 
would still be working there, and it 
would be, perhaps, less of a strain on 
the dregs of energy that might remain. 

“T depressed the green symbol hoping 
I had guessed truly, that red still meant 
danger, trouble and wrongness to men 
when that was built—that it meant re- 
lease and cancellation for a wrongly 
pressed key. That left green to be an 
operative call signal. 

“Nothing happened. The green key 
alone was not enough. I looked again, 
pressed the green key and that stud I 
had first pressed. 

“The thing hummed again. But it 
was a deeper note now, an entirely dif- 
ferent sound, and there was a frenzied 


clicking inside. Then the green stud 
kicked back at me. The Neptune key 
under the pointer glowed softly; the 
screen began to shimmer with a grayish 
light. And, abruptly, the humming 
groaned as though at a terrific overload ; 
the screen turned dull; the little signal 
light under Neptune’s key grew dim. 
The signal was being sent—hurled out. 

“Minute after minute I stood there, 
staring. . The screen grew very slowly, 
very gently duller, duller. The energy 
was fading. The last stored driblet was 
being hurled away—away into space. 
‘Oh,’ I groaned, ‘it’s hopeless—hopeless 
“to—’ 

“I’d realized the thing would take 
hours to get to that distant planet, 
traveling at the speed of light, even if 
it had been correctly aligned. But the 
machinery that should have done that 
through the years probably had long 
since failed for lack of power. 

“But I stood there till the groaning 
motors ceased altogether, and the screen 
was as dark as I’d found it, the signal 
light black. I released the stud then, 
and backed away, dazed by the utter 
collapse of an insane hope. Experi- 
mentally I pressed the Neptune symbol 
again. So little power was left now, 
that only the faintest wash of murky 
light projected the Neptune image, little 
energy as that would have consumed. 

“I went out. Bitter. Hopeless. 
Earth’s last picture was long, long since 
painted—and mine had been the hand 
that spent Earth’s last poor resource. 
To its utter exhaustion, the eternal city 
had strived to serve the race that created 
it, and I, from the dawn of time had, at 
the end of time, drained its last poor 
atom of life. The thing was a thing 
done. 


“SLOWLY I went back to the roof 
and the dying suns. Up the miles of 
winding ramp that climbed a half mile 
straight up. I went slowly—only life 


knows haste—and I was of the dead. 


NIGHT 


19 


“IT found a bench up there—a carved 
bench of metal in the midst of a riot of 
colorful, frozen flowers. I sat down, 
and looked out across the frozen city 
to the frozen world beyond, and the 
freezing red Sun. 

“T do not know how long I sat there. 
And then something whispered in my 
mind. 

““We sought you at the television 
machine.’ 

“T leaped from the bench and stared 
wildly about me. 

“It was floating in the air—a shining 
dirigible of metal, ruby-red in that light, 
twenty feet long, perhaps ten in 
diameter, bright, warm orange light 
gleaming from its ports. I stared at it 
in amazement. 

““TIt—it worked!’ I gasped. 

“The beam carried barely enough 
energy to energize the amplifiers when 
it reached Neptune, however,’ replied 
the creature in the machine. 

“TI couldn’t see him—I knew I wasn’t 
hearing him, but somehow that didn’t 
surprise me. 

“*Your oxygen has almost entirely 
given out, and I believe your mind is 
suffering from lack of oxygen. I would 
suggest you enter the lock; there is air 
in here.’ 

“T don’t know how he knew, but the 
gauges confirmed his statement. The 
oxygen was pretty nearly gone. I had 
perhaps another hour’s supply if I 
opened the valves wide—but it was a 
most uncomfortably near thing, even so. 

“T got in. I was beaming, joyous. 
There was life. This universe was not 
so dead as I had supposed. Not on 
Earth, perhaps, but only because they 
did not choose! They had space ships! 
Eagerly I climbed in, a strange thrill 
running through my body as I crossed 
the threshold of the lock. The door 
closed behind me with a soft shush on 
its soft gaskets, locked, and a pump 
whined somewhere for a moment; then 
the inner door opened. I stepped in— 


20 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


and instantly turned .off my alcohol 
burners. There was heat—heat and 
light and air! 

“In a moment I had the outer lacings 
loose, and the inner zipper down. Thirty 
seconds later I stepped out of the suit, 
and took a deep breath. The air was 
clean and sweet and warm, invigorating, 
fresh-smelling, as though it had blown 
over miles of green, Sun-warmed fields. 
It smelled alive, and young. 


“THEN I looked for the man who 
had come for me. There was none. In 
the nose of the ship, by the controls, 
floated a four-foot globe of metal, softly 
glowing with a warm, golden light. The 
light pulsed slowly or swiftly with the 
rhythm of his thoughts, and I knew that 
this was the one who had spoken to me. 

“*You had expected a human?’ he 
thought to me. ‘There are no more. 
There have been none for a time I can- 
not express in your mind. Ah, yes, you 
have a mathematical means of expres- 
sion, but no understanding of that time, 
so it is useless. But the last of humanity 
was allowed to end before the Sun 
changed from the original G-O stage— 
a very, very long time ago.’ 

“T looked at him and wondered. 
Where was he from? Who—what— 
what manner of thing? Was it an 
armor-incased living creature or another 
of the perfect machines? 

“T felt him watching my mind operate, 
pulsing softly in his golden light. And 
suddenly I thought to look out of the 
ports. The dim red suns were wheel- 
ing across those ports at an unbelievable 
rate. Earth was long since gone. As 
I looked, a dim, incredibly dim, red disk 
suddenly appeared, expanded—and I 
looked in awe at Neptune. 

“The planet was scarcely visible when 
we were already within a dozen millions 
of miles. It was a jeweled world. 
Cities—the great, perfect cities—still 
glowed. They glowed in soft, golden 
light above, and below, the harsher, 


brighter blue of mercury vapor lighted 
them. 

“He was speaking again. ‘We are 
machines—the ultimate development of 
man’s. machines. Man was almost gone 
when we came. 

“With what we have learned in the 
uncounted dusty megayears since, we 
might have been able to save him. We 
could not then. It was better, wiser, 
that man end than that he sink down so 
low as he must, eventually. Evolution 
is the rise under pressure. Devolution 
is the gradual sinking that comes when 
there is no pressure—and there is no 
end to it. Life vanished from this sys- 
tem—a dusty infinity I cannot sort in 
my memory—my type memory, truly, 
for I have complete all the memories 
of those that went before me that I re- 
place. But my memory cannot stretch 
back to that time you think of—a time 
when the constellations 

“Tt is useless to try. Those mem- 
ories are buried under others, and those 
still buried under the weight of a billion 
centuries. 

“We enter’-—he named a city; I can- 
not reproduce that name—now. You 
must return to Earth though in some 
seven and a quarter of your days, for 
the magnetic axis stretches back in 
collapsing field strains. I will be able 
to inject you into it, I believe.’ 

“So I entered that city, the living city 
of machines, that had been when time 
and the universe were young. 

“TI did not know then that, when all 
this universe had dissolved away, when 
the last sun was black and cold, scat- 
tered dust in a fragment of a scattered 
universe, this planet with its machine 
cities would go on—a last speck of warm 
light in a long-dead universe. I did not 
know then. 

“You still wonder that we let man 
die out?’ asked the machine. ‘It was 
best. In another brief million years he 
would have lost his high estate. It was 
best. 


NIGHT 21 


“Now we go on. We cannot end, as 
he did. . It is automatic with us.’ 

“T felt it then, somehow. The blind, 
purposeless continuance of the machine 
cities I could understand. They had no 
intelligence, only functions. These ma- 
chines—these living, thinking, reasoning 
investigators—had only one function, 
too. Their function was slightly differ- 
ent—they were designed to be eternally 
curious, eternally investigating. And 
their striving was the more purposeless 
of the two, for theirs could reach no end. 
The cities fought eternally only the 
blind destructiveness of nature, wear, 
decay, erosion. 

“But their struggle had an opponent 
forever, so long as they existed. The 
intelligent—no, not quite intelligent, but 
something else—curious machines. were 
without opponents. They had to be 
curious. They had to go on investi- 
gating. And they had been going on 
in just this way for such incompre- 
hensible ages that there was no longer 
anything to be curious about. Who- 
ever, whatever designed them gave them 
function and forgot purpose. Their 
only curiosity was the wonder if there 
might, somewhere, be one more thing 
to learn. 

“That—and the problem they did not 
want to solve, but must try to solve, be- 
cause of the blind functioning of their 
very structure. 

“Those eternal cities were limited. 
The machines saw now that limit, and 
so the hope of final surcease in it. They 
worked on the energy of the atom. But 
the masses of the suns were yet tre- 
mendous. They were dead for want of 
energy. The masses of the planets were 
stillenormous. But they, too, were dead 
for want of energy. 


“THE MACHINES there on Nep- 
tune gave me food and drink—strange, 


synthetic foods and drinks. There had 
been none on all the planet. They, per- 
force, started a machine, unused in a 


billion years and more, that-I might eat. 
Perhaps they were glad to do so. It 
brought the end appreciably nearer, that 
vast consumption of mine. 

“They used so very, very little, for 
they were so perfectly efficient. The 
only possible fuel in all the universe is 
one—hydrogen. From hydrogen, the 
lightest of elements, the heaviest can be 
built up, and energy released. They 
knew how to destroy matter utterly to 
energy, and could do it. 


“But while the energy release of 
hydrogen compounding to the heavy 
elements is controllable, the destruction 
of matter to energy is a self-regenera- 
tive process. Started once, it spreads 
while matter lies within its direct, con- 
tiguous reach. It is wild, uncontrollable. 
It is impossible to utilize the full energy 
of matter. 

“The suns had found that. They had 
burned their hydrogen until it was a 
remnant so small the action could not go 
on. 

“On ail Earth there was not an atom 
of hydrogen—nor was there on any 
planet, save Neptune. And there the 
store was not great. I used an appre- 
ciable fraction while I was there. That 
is their last hope. They can see the 
end, now. 

“T stayed those few days, and the 
machines came and went. Always in- 
vestigating, always curious.. But there 
is in all that universe nothing to investi- 
gate save the one problem they do not 
want to solve—the problem they are 


_sure they cannot solve. 


“The machine took me back to Earth, 
set up something near me that glowed 
with a peculiar, steady, gray light. It 
would fix the magnetic axis on me, on 
my location, within a few hours. He 
could not stay near when the axis 
touched again. He went back to Nep- 
tune, but a few millions of miles distant, 
in this shrunken mummy of the solar 
system. 


22 


“T stood alone on the roof of the city, 
in the frozen garden with its deceptive 
look of life. 

“And I thought of that night I had 
spent, sitting up with the dead man. I 
had come and watched him die. And I 
sat up with him in the quiet. I had 
wanted some one, any one to talk to. 

“T did then. Overpoweringly it came 
to me I was sitting up in the night of the 
universe, in the night and quiet of the 
universe, with a dead planet’s body, with 
the dead, ashen hopes of countless, 
nameless generations of men and 
women. The universe was dead, and I 
sat up alone—alone in the dead hush. 

“Out beyond, a last flicker of life was 
dying on the planet Neptune—a last, 
false flicker of aimless life, but not life. 
Life was dead. The world was dead. 

“TI knew there would never be another 
sound here. For all the little remainder 
of time. For this was the dark and the 
night of time and the universe. It was 
inevitable, the inevitable end that had 


been simply more distant in my day— 
in the long, long-gone time when the 


Stars were mighty lighthouses of a 
mighty space, not the dying, flickering 
candles at the head of a dead planet. 

“It had been inevitable then; the can- 
dles must burn out for all their brave_ 
show. But now I could see them gut- 
tering low, the last, fruitless dregs of 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


energy expiring as the machines below 
had spent their last dregs of energy in 
that hopeless, utterly faithful gesture— 
to attempt the repair of the city already 
dead. 

“The universe had been dead a billion 
years. It had been. This, I saw, was 
the last radiation of the heat of life 
from an already-dead body—the feel of 
life and warmth, imitation of life by a 
corpse. Those suns had long and long 
since ceased to generate energy. They 
were dead, and their corpses were giving 
off the last, lingering life heat before 
they cooled. 

“T ran. I think I ran—down away 
from the flickering, red suns in the sky. 
Down to the shrouding blackness of the 
dead city below, where neither light, nor 
heat, nor life, nor imitation of life 
bothered me. 

“The utter blackness quieted me some- 
what. So I turned off my oxygen 
valves, because I wanted to die sane, 
even here, and I knew I'd never come 
back. 

“The impossible happened! I came 
to with that raw oxygen in my face. I 
don’t know how I came—only that here 
is warmth and life. 

“Somewhere, on the far side of that 
bismuth coil, inevitable still, is the dead 
planet and the flickering, guttering can- 
dies that light the death watch I must 
keep at the end of time.” 


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Derelict 


by Raymond Z. Gallun 


The monster was 
in full view now, 
its head raised 
to the level 
of Jan’s 

eyes. 


right of the Sun, its spherical hull 
half illumined and half in shadow. 
No ‘native of the solar system could 
have guessed either its age or its ori- 
gin. Battered, lifeless, desolate and for- 


| DRIFTED there in space, to the 


lorn, it betrayed a kinship both with 
the remote past and with the distant 
stars against the sharp pin points of 
which its bulk was limned. 

Jan Van Tyren should have felt a 
surge of enthusiasm over his discovery 


24 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


of this derelict vessel of the void. Yet 
he did not. Within him there was room 
for little but the gnawing ache of grief. 
Listlessly preoccupied, he stood before 
the periscope screen of his own trim 
craft, watching with only a shadow of 
interest the spheroid pictured in it. 

His big, loose body seemed to droop 
without animation before his instru- 
ments. A tuft of yellow hair protruded, 
cynical and slovenly, from beneath his 
leather helmet. All the strength had 
been drained out of him. His blue 
eyes were clouded, as if he gazed less 
at reality than at some horror of 
memory. 

He had seen blood often during his 
years with the Jupiter company. He’d 
seen death and revolt. Such things 
were incidental to colonization, to 
progress. But Greta and little Jan— 
they had been safe. That any one, 
even the horrid Loathi of the Jovian 
moon, Ganymede, might harm them, 
had seemed inconceivable. His young 
The tor- 


wife, his baby—murdered. 
turing vision of what had happened had 
been with him for days now. Three? 


Four? He didn’t want to recall any- 
thing related to that vision. 

He didn’t want to forget it either. 
Nor was it possible to forget. He kept 
hearing the weird screams of the Loathi 
echoing inside him; he kept seeing their 
long, keen beaks, and their batlike bod- 
ies swooping crazily out of the Gany- 
medean night. Here, where no one 
could observe, he allowed himself the 
relief of a silent snarl. The look on 
his gaunt, weather-beaten face was not 
an expression of hatred. He was past 
hatred. He was numb and lost, like 
an engine without a governor. 

That was why he was out here in 
the void, with the cold stars around 
him. He was trying to escape from— 
he wasn’t completely sure what. He 
was going back to Earth to paint pic- 
tures, and to seek in its mellow at- 
- mosphere of peace something that was 


lacking in the cruel environment of 
Joraanin, the outpost of which he had 
been master. He was quitting cold— 
returning home to heal his soul. 

Small wonder then that even a space 
ship which had floated without aim 
across the light years, perhaps from an- 
other galaxy, could not awaken in him 
a spark of real enthusiasm. Mystery 
and the promise of adventure no longer 
had any direct appeal. 

Yet Jan Van Tyren was still a crea- 
ture of habit. Though his mind was 
caught up in a maelstrom of pain, still 
the automatic part of him continued 
to function with some semblance of 
normalcy. He was an artist; so, almost 
unconsciously, the channels which his 
hobby had established in his brain began 
their intended work—taking note of 
form and color. 

He saw the contrasts of light and 
shade playing their bizarre tricks with 
the details of the great globular hull. 
He saw the deep grooves that stray 
meteors had scored in a crisscross pat- 
tern on the lusterless gray shell of the 
derelict. 

He took note of the slender rods pro- 
jecting like the prongs of a bur from 
the vessel’s form, and of: the rows of 
windows that met his gaze blankly, as 
if they were eyes that wondered in an 
uncomprehending way what he and his 
flier might be. All this could have been 
a picture that a man might paint, starkly 
beautiful against the black background 
of the universe. 

Then-.too, Jan Van Tyren was an 
engineer by profession; and though he 
wished to leave such matters buried in 
the past, once more the habit of long 
experience had its way. Something 
deep in Jan’s being, detached from his 
other thoughts, wondered what marvels 
of invention and science a survey of 
the derelict might reveal. 

These combined forces gave to him 
that small thread of interest. Life had 
no strong purpose any more, and he 


DERELICT 25 


was in no hurry to continue the two 
months of continuous flying that would 
bring him across the etheric desert to 
his native planet. 

Van Tyren’s hands flashed over con- 
trols with careless ease, as if they 
moved without the guidance of his 
brain. The space boat turned, begin- 
ning the graceful curve that would 
bring it alongside the spheroid. Across 
the periscope screen stars reeled; then 
Jupiter appeared, a tiny belted bead 
millions of miles away. Around it 
were the specks of radiance that were 
its moons. 

Finally the derelict came back into 
view, gigantic and near. It appeared 
to be some three hundred feet in diam- 
eter. The feeble light of the distant 
Sun shone on it, revealing in its lower 
hemisphere a ragged rent whose depths 
were shrouded in shadow. 


JAN steered his flier into a position 
from which he could get a_ better 
glimpse of the interior of the spheroid, 


beyond the torn opening in its shell. 
Spear points of light pierced the thick 
shadows there, revealing crumpled 
masses of metal. But there was suffi- 
cient room for his purpose. 

Without considering the possible dan- 
ger of the move, and in fact quite in- 
different now to such danger, Jan 
worked the guide levers and throttle of 
his craft. There were sharp bursts of 
incandescence from its rocket vents. 
It turned, swaying; then glided into 
the hole in the side of the derelict and 
came to rest amid the wreckage. 

With what might have been a frag- 
ment of his old active spirit, Jan Van 
Tyren donned space armor. But his 
memories were still with him. He 
cursed once. No, it was not really a 
curse; the fury was lacking. There 
was only anguish in it. It was like the 
whimper of a big dog with a thorn in 
its foot. 

He climbed through the airlock, and 


for a minute stood quietly, viewing his 
surroundings. Somewhere _ gravity 
plates continued to function in this an- 
cient wreck, for he had weight here— 
perhaps one third Earth-normal. Junk 
was everywhere in the cavernous in- 
terior, distorted and crumpled gro- 
tesquely. Yet the metal was bright and 
new. 

Whatever colossal weapon had ripped 
the globular vessel open like this might 
have done so within the hour or a bil- 
ion years ago, as far as any one could 
tell from visual inspection. There was 
no air; oxides didn’t form; nothing 
moved, nothing changed. There was 
no sound in Jan’s ears save the rustle 
of his own pulse. It was as if time had 
stopped in this minute speck of the 
universe. Only the derelict’s aura of 
desertion, and the memory of the 
countless meteor scorings on its outer 
shell, suggested to Van Tyren its vast 
age. 

Meteors are too rare to constitute a 
menace in the traveled lanes of the solar 
system, and in the interstellar void they 
are rare indeed. Lifetimes might go 
by before one of those minor collisions 
took place; and they were numbered 
in thousands. 

Rearing from the débris was a stair- 
way. Jan learned later to think of it 
by that term, though it was not a stair- 
way such as men would find conven- 
ient to use. It was a pillar, fluted spi- 
rally after the fashion of the threads 
of a screw. At regular intervals pegs 
were set along these threads, to pro- 
vide a grip for some kind of prehensile 
member. 

The pillar swept upward to meet a 
broad roof. Sunlight, stabbing in from 
space, awoke an opalescent gleam on 
the metal surfaces of this queer means 
of ascent to whatever lay in the bulk 
of the derelict overhead. 

Jan took hold of the pegs on the 
fluted column, and with easy surges 
hoisted his loose, muscular frame to- 


26 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


ward the top. Beside the place where 
the pillar joined the ceiling was a trap- 
door. He fumbled with the lever that 
latched it. It slid aside, allowing him 
to pass through into a tiny square com- 
partment which appeared to have the 
function of an airlock—for there was 
another similar trapdoor in its roof. 

The lower entrance had closed be- 
neath him, and now he unfastened the 
valve over his head and climbed into 
the chamber above. 


DUST and silence and motionless 
mechanical grandeur reminiscent of the 
tomb of a dead Cyclops—that in brief 
was a description of the place. It was 
much larger than the room below. 
Through windows along one wall the 
Sun shone, gilding inert engines whose 
monstrous forms seemed capable of 
generating sufficient power to tear a 
planet from its orbit. Huge cylinders 
of opalescent metal reared upward. 


Flywheels which on Earth would have 
weighed hundreds of tons, rested in 


their pivot sockets. Cables, wires, and 
pipettes ran between colossal, generator- 
like contrivances. Crystal tubes stood 
in webby tripods, or were supported in 
framework attached to the ceiling; but 
no energy flowed in the delicate fila- 
ments that formed their vitals, and 
there was no way for a man to tell what 
purposes they were intended to fulfill. 

Between the windows massive rods 
were mounted, pointing through the ex- 
ternal wall of the sphere, as the weap- 
ons of a battleship would do. What- 
ever the race that had been responsible 
for this outlay, it was certain that it 
had been a race of fighters. 

Jan Van Tyren, browsing listlessly 
among these wonders of another solar 
system, obtained his first direct hint of 
what the owners of the ship had been 
like. Sinuous patches of gray ash, con- 
torted so as to still portray the agonies 
of death, sprawled here and there on 
the floor. Brown flakes, resembling bits 


of parchment, were mixed with the ash 
—the remnant, probably, of chitinous 
exoskeletons. 

The crew of the derelict had been 
slain. The pitted plating of the floor 
around the remains of each of their 
bodies, showed that clearly. Something 
hot and corrosive had blasted them out 
of existence. They had battled val- 
iantly, but they had been overcome. 

Jan saw a silvery object lying be 
side one of the areas of ash. He picked 
it up. A mummified fragment of flesh, 
suggestive of the foot of a bird, clung 
to it, its three prehensile toes curved 
fiercely around the grip and trigger but- 
ton of the small weapon. 

Yes, those unknowns had fought as 
men would do; but they had failed. 
Van Tyren’s set face exhibited a fleet- 
ting sneer as he hurled the object aside. 

He went on with his explorations. 
The dust of remote mortality swirled up 
in the path of his careless feet, filling 
the Sunbeams from the windows with 
eddying motes. There was air here to 
support the motes; but whether it was 
breathable after the passage of ages 
seemed hardly probable. 

Jan paused before a_ switchboard. 
His gauntleted hand fumbled hesitantly 
over a dial at its center. He turned 
the dial to the right. A faint vibra- 
tion was transmitted to his fingers. He 
turned the dial more, not knowing that 
his act was perhaps altering a detail in 
the normal course of destiny. The vi- 
bration increased. He stood back, wait- 
ing. 

Beneath the framework mounting of 
the switchboard was a cabinet of 
smooth, tawny material. The front of 
it opened now, revealing a darkened 
interior. From the opening a slender 
head was thrust, swaying with rhythmic 
cadence from side to side. It had a 
single eye, as expressionless as the lens 
of a camera, which in truth the orb 
seemed to be. 

There was no mouth in evidence, nor 


DERELICT 27 


any need of one; for this thing, though 
it presented characteristics commonly 
associated with living creatures, yet was 
marked with the unmistakable stamp 
of the machine. The triangular head 
had the purple gloss of the other met- 
allic objects in the room. The intri- 
cate appendages which projected around 
its throat, forming a sort of frilled col- 
lar, were of the same substance. Be- 
neath them the slender length of the 
thing was revealed as it crept in ser- 
pentine fashion from the cabinet. Its 
body was composed of thousands of 
glistening segments, as minutely tooled 
as the parts of a watch. 

The monster was in full view now, 
its head raised to the level of Jan’s eyes. 
Instinctively he had backed away, 
though somehow the idea of danger did 
not occur to him. Perhaps he had left 
normal caution behind him on Gany- 
mede. 

For a time, nothing more happened. 
The triangular head continued to sway 
from side to side, but that was all. Van 
Tyren stood statuesquely, his feet 
spread wide apart in bullish defiance 
directed not so much against this amaz- 
ing fabrication as against his own ach- 
ing memories. Even the tangible truth 
of this fantastic episode could not 
wholly smother the agony of the recent 


Presently the serpentine robot turned 
and glided off among the surrounding 


maze of machines. With a grace that 
was at once beautiful and abhorrent it 
writhed its way to an apparatus at the 
center of the room. Its glittering ap- 
pendages touched controls skillfully. 


A BLAST of air surged from vents 
high up on the walls. Jan felt the thrust 
of it against his armor, and saw the 
ashes of the derelict’s dead crew go 
Swirling away into other vents along 
with the lifeless vapor that had been 
sealed for so many eons in this tomb 
of space. 


In response to some further manipu- 
lation of dials and switches on the part 
of the robot, a light, restful blue began 
to burn in a crystal tube above Jan’s 
head. He looked up at it and it seemed 
to exert a soothing, hypnotic influence 
upon him. He did not even protest 
when the unknown that he had freed 
returned to his side and made a gentle 
attempt to remove his space armor. 
His own fingers closed on the fasten- 
ings and helped those delicate metallic 
members to complete the task. 

Free of the cumbersome attire, he 
stood eagerly in those cool, blue rays. 
They appeared to probe to every cor- 
ner of his being, drawing all the ache 
and tension out of his tortured nerves. 

The grief in his mind blurred to a 
diffused sweetness. At first he was 
almost terrified. It was sacrilege to let 
the thought of his wife and son fade 
away from him so. Then, no longer 
wishing to think, he*surrendered com- 
pletely to the healing, Lethean influence 
of the rays. 

The air around him now was cold and 
refreshing. He sucked in great lung- 
fuls of it. He flexed his muscles in- 
dolently, and at last his rugged face 
broke into a smile. Somewhere music 
whispered—exotic music out of a time 
and region too distant to fathom. 

The automaton was gliding here and 
there with no sound except a soft, slith- 
ering jingle. It was putting things in 
order, inspecting and readjusting this 
device and that. Jan wondered how 
many thousands of millenniums had 
gone by since any of those machines 
had been called upon to function. He 
wondered too at the unfathomable kind- 
dess of his queer host, and whether it 
had read his mind, learning of the pain 
that had crushed him. 

But the rays made him inclined 
rather to accept than to question, and 
for a while he did not pursue his ideas 
further. He was in no hurry. He had 
not a care or responsibility in the uni- 


28 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


verse. There was plenty of time for 
everything. 

After perhaps an hour under the tube 
of the blue light, Jan Van Tyren real- 
ized that he was hungry. Little food 
had passed his lips since the quick de- 
parture from Ganymede. He put on 
his space suit again, descended through 
the airlock by which he had entered 
this chamber and shinned down the 
spirally fluted pillar. Before he had 
reached the bottom the robot was de- 
scending above him, its flexible, snake- 
like body sliding easily in the spiral 
grooves. The thing had deserted its 
tasks to follow him. 


JAN proceeded to gather certain 


food articles from the store of concen- 
trated rations aboard his space boat. 
But before he had collected what he 
wanted, the automaton was beside him, 
trying to help. Jan attempted to shove 
those gleaming claws away, but they 
were persistent; and finally, in a mood 


to accept the gentle suggestion, he 
capitulated, allowing the robot to take 
several containers from him. 

“T think I know what you are.” Jan 
chuckled inside his oxygen helmet. 
“You were made to take care of the 
various small wants of the people who 
manned this ship. Now that there isn’t 
any one else to play servant to, you've 
picked me as your boss.” 

He collected a few other articles—the 
sleeping bag of his flier, several astro- 
nomical instruments and the case con- 
taining his artist’s equipment—and 
thrust them into the waiting arms of 
the robot. 

“Might as well take this stuff along 
too,” he said, “so I won’t have to climb 
down again and get it.” 

He paused to see what the friendly 
mechanism would do next. The result 
was just faintly amusing. After a mo- 
ment of uncertainty it approached him. 
A stubby member which was part of 
the frill- of appendages around its 


throat elongated itself like a telescope, 
coiled its metal length around his waist 
and hoisted him easily off his feet, 
Then the serpentine monster made its 
weaving way to the stair amd com- 
menced to ascend with its new master 
and the bulky equipment. 

“Hey!” Van Tyren protested. “This 
is making a good thing too good! I’m 
not a cripple!” 

But even though the automaton may 
have possessed a means of divining the 
telepathic waves of the thoughts behind 
Jan’s words, still it had its way with 
him. 

The man, hardened and self-reliant 
though he had always been, accepted 
the mild, emasculating yoke of a mon- 
ster of which he really knew nothing, 
quite as trustingly as a child accepts 
the love of its mother. The blue ray 
was not penetrating his body here, but 
its care-effacing power still persisted. 
And he had no thought of the possibly 
dangerous consequences of the spell. 

He remembered the Mercurian who 
had valeted one of the friends of his 
student days. Khambee was the Mer- 
curian’s name—a curious elf whose un- 
obtrusive yet insistent indulgence was 
much the same as that of this mechani- 
cal slave. 

“Khambee the second,” Van Tyren 
pronounced good-naturedly, bestowing 
the nomen on the automaton that bore 
him. “It fits you.” 

In the chamber of wonders beyond 
the airlock, Jan set out his meal and 
ate, while Khambee watched with his 
camera eye, as if to learn the intricacies 
of the task. 

Then he crept through an opening in 
the wall and returned with a bowl con- 
taining cubes of a golden, translucent 
compound that emitted a pleasant odor. 
He set the bowl beside the man. 

Van Tyren took one of the cubes, 
tasted it, and devoured it without con- 
sidering that, to his Earthly system, the 
substance.might be poisonous. But he 


DERELICT 29 


experienced no ill effects. The food 
was slightly fibrous, but sweet and 
tasty. He consumed more of it with 
relish. 

The blue rays from the tube on the 
ceiling poured their lulling effulgence 
over him. The whisper of music, thin 
and threadlike and soothing, worked its 
magic upon his senses. Jan crouched 
on the floor, his head nodding against 
his knees. 

So he remained for a long time, nei- 
ther awake nor quite asleep, his brain 
and nerves pervaded by a deliciously 
restful quasiconsciousness. Khambee 
had disappeared, perhaps to attend to 
some obscure matter in another part of 
the vessel. 


SUCH was the beginning of Jan Van 
Tyren’s adventure on the derelict. As 
yet he gave the future no attention, 
living each careless moment as it came; 
thinking, but not too deeply. Never 


before had the instinct of the empire 
builder in him been so completely sub- 


merged. 

Just to amuse himself he set up his 
astronomical ingtruments and took mi- 
nute ie of both Jupiter and 
the stars at’ intervals of an hour, to 
discover what sort of path the derelict 
was following. The angular change in 
the positions of those celestial land- 
marks told the story. 

The vessel was a moon of the planet 
Jupiter, swinging around it slowly in 
an immense orbit many millions of 
miles across. Probably it had been do- 
ing so for eons before men had consid- 
ered seriously the problem of traffic 
between worlds. 

The fact that it had never been dis- 
covered until he had stumbled upon it 
was easy to explain. Without guidance 
it would be simpler to find an individual 
gtain of sand on a beach, than to locate 
to small a satellite in the vastness of 
the etheric desert. 

Now. however, with distances and 


velocities measured perfectly, there 
would be no trouble in estimating where 
the vessel would be at a given second. 
Jan fumbled with the paper on which 
he had made his calculations, and then 
carelessly tossed it aside. 

Like the good servant he was, Kham- 
bee, who happened to be present, picked 
it up and placed it in a little case fast- 
ened at his throat. 

Looking at the stars gleaming so glo- 
riously in the ebon firmament had given 
Jan Van Tyren an inspiration, 

“Men are fools,” he confided to 
Khambee. “Trouble and misfortune 
are all the reward they get for their 
struggles. It was the same with the 
serpent folk who made you. Those of 
them who formed the crew of this ves- 
sel were killed—murdered. 

“Why can’t we escape from all that 
sort of nonsense, Khambee? Why 
can’t we fix up this ship so that it can 
travel out to the stars? What an ad- 
venture that would be! Vagabonding 
from one planet to another without any 
responsibilities, and without ever re- 
turning to the solar system! That 
would be something worthwhile, Kham- 
bee.” 

Jan was only talking for companion- 
ship’s sake, attempting to give an idle 
dream a semblance of reality. He did 
not believe that what he spoke of was 
possible. There was the matter of food, 
water, and energy. It seemed unlikely 
that this decrepit derelict’s supply of 
each was sufficient for such a venture. 

However, Khambee had greater pow- 
ers at his command than Van Tyren 
could guess. And there had been built 
into the inorganic frame of him an 
astute understanding that penetrated the 
very motives and purposes animating 
flesh, bone, nerves and brain tissue. 

He appeared to listen attentively to 
the rustling thought waves of his hu- 
man master. Then, impelled by the 
complex urges which the genius of his 
creator had stamped indelibly into the 


3% ASTOUNDING STORIES 


metal and crystal intricacies of his be- 
ing, he returned to the tasks which he 
was meant to do. 

And Jan Van Tyren, who had estab- 
lished and bossed Joraanin, the Gany- 
mede colony, continued with his idle 
play. He slept, he ate exotic foods, he 
wandered about the ship, he dreamed; 
but most of all he painted, setting up 
his easel wherever whim might sug- 
gest. And the marvels around him 
seemed, by their very aura of strange- 
ness, to direct and control his skillful 
fingers. 

He painted great engines with shafts 
of Sunlight twinkling on them; he stud- 
ied the highlights that shifted elusively 
in the hollow grooves of the pillars 
which the sinuous folk of long ago had 
used as stairways, and he transferred 
the forms of those stairways to canvas. 

He painted Khambee at work with a 
flaming welding tool, slim, efficient, and 
almost noiseless. He even painted 


scenes and subjects of Earth and Gany- 


mede—pleasant reminiscences, for all 
that was unpleasant had been shoved far 
into the background of his mind. 

A white collie of his childhood. A 
jagged mountain jutting out of the red 
desert of Ganymede. Greta, blond and 
pretty and smiling. Little Jan with 
his stiff, yellow curls. Such were the 
subjects of his pictures. He thought 
of his wife and child, but only of the 
happy incidents of their lives together. 

The horror was blurred and distant. 
The blue rays saw to that. And so a 
will not his own, and perhaps not even 
Khambee’s, but belonging to a serpen- 
tine monster dead for ages, controlled 
Jan Van Tyren. 

At odd moments he watched space, 
and felt the yearning pull of the stars. 
Thus many days must have gone by. 
He did not bother to keep track. 


THE TIME CAME when he was 
aroused from slumber by a throbbing 


sound, soft, but eloquent of titanic 
forces at work. He crept out of his 
sleeping bag and stared at the source 
of the disturbance. Huge flywheels 
were spinning. He felt a powerful 
thrust as the ship’s propulsive equip- 
ment took hold for a fraction of a 
second. 

Then Khambee, worming his slender 
shape like a weaving shuttle here and 
there among the machinery, broke the 
contacts of massive switches. The ac- 
tivity died to silence once more. But 
the test had been made and Jan sensed 
that it had been successful. 

He hurried forward. “We've got 
enough power then?” he demanded 
huskily. “Have we?” 

For an answer the robot opened the 
side of a cylindrical arrangement, and 
with the clawed tip of an appendage, 
pointed to the maze of coils and crystal 
that glowed with heat inside. 

Jan studied the apparatus intently 
for several minutes. Much of it was 
beyond his grasp; but there were places 
where tangible fact corresponded with 
human theory. Energy from the cos- 
mic ray which exists everywhere in 
space. Limitless, inexhaustible energy! 
The engines of the vessel were worked 
by it. 

“T see,” Van Tyren commented qui- 
etly. “The power problem is solved. 
Have we enough food, air, and water?” 

Khambee led him through the laby- 
rinths of the ship to a place where he 
had never been before—a hall lined 
with vast, transparent tanks, most of 
them filled with a clear liquid that had 
been sealed up for ages. There was 
water enough here to make the ship a 
little world, independent of outside 
sources, since none could escape from 
the sealed hull. 

Farther down the corridor were other 
tanks filled with preserved food sup- 
plies, and beyond them were extensive 
chambers where odd, bulbous things 


DERELICT 31 


were growing under the intense light 
of great globes. 

Were those growths plants of some 
kind, or artificial cultures to be clas- 
sified somewhere between the organic 
‘and the inorganic? Their color was 
deep-green. Was it chlorophyll, or a 
substance analagous in function to the 
chlorophyll of green plants? Perhaps 
it did not matter. Here food was be- 
ing produced under the action of the 
intense light. 

Carbon dioxide, piped to these cham- 
bers from all parts of the craft, was 
being split up by those queer growths, 
and the oxygen in it was being freed 
to refresh the atmosphere of the ship. 
Khambee had started a process that had 
ben dead for uncounted millenniums; 
now it could go on indefinitely. 

Nourishment, water and oxygen— 
everything essential to life had been 
taken care of. 

“Speed?” Jan questioned. “Can we 
build up sufficient speed to travel be- 
. tween the stars without making the trip 
endless ?”” 

It was an important query. No man- 
built ship could have reached the outer 
galaxies in a lifetime, though there were 
experiments in progress which in a dec- 
ade or so might produce promising 
results, 

Khambee’s tactile appendages swung 
toward a huge power-distributer tube 
near by in a gesture of confidence. 

Jan was satisfied. “Then we're 
going,’ he said. “There’s not much 
left for me here in the solar system.” 

His voice was steady, but the thrill 
of adventures to come made his heart 
pound and sent tingling prickles through 
his scalp muscles. 

Khambee the unfathomable offered 
no protest, yet his actions indicated 
that there was work still to be done. 

He clutched his master’s arm and 
drew him along gloomy passages to a 
storeroom filled with various machinery 


parts and other supplies. Here he se- 
lected a great sheaf of metal plates, 
and bore it back to the airlock which 
opened into the wrecked compartment 
where Jan’s space boat was housed. The 
silvery length of him passed through 1t, 
lugging the heavy load. 

Jan Van Tyren donned his air-tight 
armor and followed. 


FOR SEVERAL HOURS he 
watched the slave robot patch the great 
rent. During that time the effects of 
the blue ray must have worn off; for 
presently, of his own volition, he tried to 
help, holding the massive plates steady 
while his snakelike henchman welded 
them into place with a flame tool. 
Khambee accepted the assistance with- 
out protest. f 

Jan was more his own self now— 
cool, dominant, purposeful, making 
ready for a venture which no man had 
yet attempted. 

At last the job was finished. The 
wreckage of an ancient battle was 
neatly cleared away, the jagged hole 
was covered, and only an oval door was 
left, through which the flier might pass 
when necessary. 

The eye lens of the robot met Jan’s 
gaze briefly. “All is prepared,” it 
seemed to say. 

Van Tyren nodded, his 
beaten face grim, hard, 
“Good!” he commented. 

He shinned up the spiral pillar. 
Khambee was close behind, but he did 
not offer to help. 


weather- 
smiling. 


Nor did he go immediately to the 


controls of the engines. Instead he 
drew the man to a broad, white screen, 
which was part of a complex apparatus 
near by. He snapped switches and 
twirled dials expertly. 

Pictures appeared in the screen— 
bleak, rolling desert and _ tortured 
gorges. Then an oasis where there was 
water, and where the radioactive ores 


32 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


underground provided enough heat to 
permit the growth of vegetation. At its 
center was a little, rough city under 
a crystal dome. Joraanin, the Gany- 
mede colony! 

Around it men and loyal Loathi were 
intrenched, fighting off hordes of rebel 
Loathi that circled on batlike wings 
above, their long beaks gleaming. The 
revolt was still in progress. A strong 
hand was needed there to end this chaos 
and death. Yes, needed. The Ben- 
sonium mines 

Jan Van Tyren stood with the oxy- 
gen helmet in his hands, his mouth 
puckering pensively. A thousand 
thoughts swarmed in his brain; prob- 
lems which he was sure he'd thrashed 
out before. Impressions of courage, of 
fear, of loyalty and of love. The 
Loathi. Greta. Little Jan. Revenge. 
No, not revenge—censtructive codpera- 
tion. That was his policy. But he 
didn’t have a policy any more, did he? 
An empire builder. But he’d given up 
Or had he? 


empire building. 

Jan’s eyes roved the gleaming, seg- 
mented form of Khambee beside him. 
All at once truth came out of the mud- 


dle. He saw one of the robot’s pur- 
poses clearly at last. Khambee had been 
the slave of a fighting race. A worker, 
and when the occasion demanded—a 
dealer. He, Jan Van Tyren, had been 
healed and freshened. His sense of 


responsibilities to come had returned, 
and he was ready for them now. 

“TI suppose I could still choose to 
leave the solar system, and you would 
obey me,” he said. “But you probably 
knew all along what my final choice 
would be. Return to your cabinet, 
Khambee. I’m going back to Joraanin 
—alone. It’s my job.” 

Khambee helped him gather his vari- 
ous possessions together, and to carry 
them down to the space boat. The exit 
door of the compartment rolled aside. 
Sunlight stabbed inward, causing the 
automaton’s body to reflect a thousand 
shifting, iridescent colors. 

Just as Van Tyren was entering the 
flier, Khambee thrust a paper into his 
hands. It was the paper on which Jan 
had recorded his astronomical measure- 
ments and had calculated the orbit and 
velocity of the derelict. 

He felt more than ever that Kham- 
bee could read his innermost thoughts. 
There was a bit of tightness in his 
throat then. 

“Thanks, Khambee,” he said very 
seriously. “This might be useful. I 
may want to come back some time. I 
may need to come back.” 

The flier was in space. Jan Van 
Tyren hummed a tune that was lost in 
the growl of the rockets. Ahead lay 
Jupiter and its satellites. Beyond them 
the bright stars seemed to smile. 


| Islands of the San 


by Jack Williamson 


V. 


WELVE DAYS MORE, per- 
haps,” said Teddu Len. “Then 
we are done.” 

The old scientist was sitting with Ken 
in an office in the fortress. Heavy, in- 


AST—3 


(Con- 


clusion) 


sulated walls shut out the pitiless heat 
of the prison planet; cool air rustled 
from a ventilating fan; the room was 
soft with the roseate, filtered rays of a 
photon disk. 

Sinl Mran, plump, pink-cheeked, en- 


34 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


ergetic, was with them. All three wore 
bandages. But they were washed, re- 
freshed, comfortable.” 

Ken, a little reluctantly, for he had 
wished the place to be Teddu Len’s, sat 
at the commandant’s desk. The revolt- 
ing miners had been organized into a 
fighting unit; Ken Darren in command, 
Teddu Len and Sinl Mran beneath him. 

“In twelve days,” repeated Teddu Len, 
“the fleet can be here from Nydron— 
and bombs falling on this building.” 

“The weapon you invented?” asked 
Ken. “Would it save us now?” 

“The device, you mean, that I planned 
as I lay in the torture cell? It is an 
atomic power wave, carried upon a tight 
beam of subelectronic radiation, which 
will penetrate the dynamic space shell. 
It would be a powerful agency of de- 
struction—but we cannot build it.” 

“Why not? We have shops, materi- 
als rs 

“Each projector requires the use of 
a crystal of okal—without it the instan- 
taneous generation of atomic energy is 
impossible.” 

Ken’s heart sank. 

“Always we need okals,” he mut- 
tered. ‘We can’t save the planets with- 
out the great one that Dakkil Kun has. 
And we can’t recover it for want of 
a small one.” 

Little Sin] Mran had let out a startled 
exclamation. 

“We have an okal, Ken,” he cried ex- 
citedly. “I saw it. It is one some pris- 
oner found long ago. It has been kept 
hidden, passed from man to man. It 
made life here endurable; its beauty is 
like a refreshing drink.” 

“How large Pe 

“It is small as a grain of sand—but 
a grain of perfect beauty.” 

“Let us see it,’ commanded Teddu 
Len eagerly. “Perhaps a 

Word went out. Within a few min- 
utes the jewel was in the old man’s 
hand. It was a minute and perfect 
sphere, harder than diamond. The touch 


of his skin set strange, soft fires to 
blazing in it, so that it burst up with 
a wondrous, changing, many-hued radi- 
ance. 

“It will do,” said Teddu Len. “J 
shall draw plans for the penetrator and 
have the parts made.” Gloomily, he 
added: “But the thing is untried, and we 
are yet marooned on Kardon.” 

“But it gives us a fighting chance,” 
said Ken. 

His hard chin set and his level, gray 
eyes darkened with grim purpose. 

“We can fight,” returned the thin, 
tired old voice of Teddu Len. “But 
Dakkil Kun has the geodesic fleets, and 
the forts on Nydron. And the flame 
creatures are with him, with their dread 
science and their great black ships.” 

Eleven days later the fleet was 
sighted, descending upon the fortress. 
The alarm brought Ken to the top of 
the great building. Beyond the shelter- 
ing canopy, he came under the white 
and featureless sky. Streaming with 
tears, even behind dark lenses, his eyes 
peered up into the dome of pitiless heat 
—and found the ships. 

Out of a sea of white flame, the geo- 
desic fliers were drifting down; huge 
and shimmering bubbles of mirrorlike 
refulgence, their surfaces were nowhere 
broken. Nine of them he counted, 
floating down over the dark, age-leveled 
horizons of flame-seared Kardon. 

The “penetrator” was close beside 
him, a relatively small mechanism, the 
minute okal lost in a mass of intricate 
tubes and coils. It was sheltered be- 
neath a dome-shaped shield which also- 
protected Teddu Len and his two assist- 
ants. 

“They are coming within range,” 
called the thin voice of the old inventor. 

“Wait,” called Ken. “One ship is 
coming ahead. Let them land it if they 
wish. Perhaps they want to parley.” 

He watched, shading his smarting 
eyes. 


“Yes, they are coming in. I'll go 


ISLANDS OF THE SUN 35 


aboard myself and offer to surrender 
the mines, undamaged, in return for a 
ship.” 

“No chance that they’d do that,”” mut- 
tered Teddu Len. 


“But—somehow—we must have a 


ship.” 

The vast, silvery sphere hung for a 
moment, silent, motionless, above the 
arms of the cradle, a bubble of mirror 
whiteness, its fulgor blinding in the ter- 
rible light, its unmarred perfection al- 
most unreal. 

Then the dynamic space shell was 
gone. The dull, copper-red of the hull, 
broken with rivet heads, air-lock and 
ports, caked with greenish oxides, col- 
lapsed into the cradle. 

A petty officer came off to announce, 
importantly : 

“Lar Radnu, Admiral of the Fleet of 
Dakkil Kun, Lhundar of the Planets, 
wishes to speak with the leader of the 
rebels here.” 

With a word to Teddu Len and Sinl 
Mran to keep on the alert, Ken followed 
the officer aboard. Within the great, 
cylindrical chamber of the ship’s air- 
lock, he met Lar Radnu. 

Little more than a boy, yet the ad- 
miral had an erect pride that became 
the winged insignia on his cap, the slen- 
der neutron gun at his belt. His thin 
face, twisted with the livid disfigure- 
ment of that long scar, was firmly set, 
composed as if with a deep, enduring 
purpose. 

He came forward quickly to take 
Ken’s hand, his dark, somber eyes 
warmed by a little smile. 

“I .remember you,” he said, in his 
low, even voice. “Your name is Ken 
Darren. You are the man from Pylos 
who spoke of his loyalty—love—for our 
lost Princess Wyndonee.” 

Again the break of the low: voice, the 
brightness of tears in those dark eyes. 

And again Ken felt a quick pulse of 
sympathy for this straight young officer. 
Briefly he wondered if he, also, might 


not have loved Wyndonee, and with 
more hope than Ken. And he was puz- 
zled again that such a man should be 
serving Dakkil Kun. 

“IT did love Wyndonee,” said Ken 
Darren. “I should have given my life 
to save her—gladly. Now I am going 
to offer it as I think she might have 
wished—in the service of mankind. 

“So long as I live,” he went on, in a 
quiet, grim voice, “I am going to fight 
your master, Dakkil Kun. I am ready 


to die in the service of Teddu Len, to 
save the planets and humanity.” 


A FAINT GLEAM of surprise came 
into the dark eyes of Lar Radnu. His 
firm lips opened a little. Ken thought 
that his dark, composed face betrayed 
a slight, incredulous hope. 

“Tf you have come to parley,” Ken 
went on, “we can offer you this: 

“The mines here are valuable. We 
are able to destroy them. We will sur- 
render them to you, intact, in return for 
a ship and freedom to leave Kardon. 
But we cannot surrender the right to 
fight ; it is more precious than our lives.” 

Lar Radnu seemed hardly to have 
heard. His sober, piercing eyes were 
fixed upon Ken with a singular intent- 
ness. 

“Did you say’—his low voice was 
tensely vibrant—‘“that the scientist, 
Teddu Len, has a plan to save the plan- 
ets?” 

“He has,” Ken told him. 

“But how?” demanded Lar Radnu. 
“Dakkil Kun has given the beings of 
flame the tensors of subspace curvature. 
They can, whenever they will, unlock 
the etheric spheres and consume the 
planets with the flame of the Sun.” 

“His plan,” said Ken, “is to lift the 
planets out beyond the surface of the 
Sun, to safety from the xyli and the 
Sun’s heat.” 

“He could do—that ?” 

The young officer was rigid with in- 
credulous wonder. 


36 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


“He has devised the necessary equip- 
ment. The thing can’t be done, how- 
ever, without the use of a great okal, 
which I found, and Dakkil Kun stole 
from me.” 

“Then it could never be done,” said 
Lar Radnu bitterly. “There is no 
weapon that will reach out through the 
dynamic space shell. The Lhundar sur- 
rendered for want of such a weapon, 
because he could not save his people 
from the heat bombs of the xyli. 

“Again it would be the same. Dak- 
kil Kun and his dread allies would de- 
stroy us before the equipment could be 
made and the planets moved.” 

“But there is a weapon,” protested 
Ken. “Teddu Len’s penetrator. It is 
untried. But he says it would destroy 
this ship in an instant.” 

Ken Darren was surprised at the next 
action of the admiral. 

Quietly, with a grave, unostentatious 
dignity, the slender young officer re- 
moved his cap with its white-winged in- 
Signia, stripped off his belted neutron 
gun, and knelt to present the two to 
Ken. 

“What,” 
mean ?” 

“The penetrator,” said the young ad- 
miral gravely, “has conquered the fleet 
of the Lhundar, Dakkil Kun. I now 
surrender the fleet to you. If you wish 
to return my insignia, I shall be glad to 
remain in command, under-your orders.” 

Sudden tears glittered in his dark 
eyes. “I shall be glad to serve under 
you in the defense of humanity against 
Dakkil Kun and the creatures of 
flame.” 

Ken’s throat was aching suddenly, 
and his lips were quivering and stiff, so 
that he could not reply. Silently, he 
returned the weapon and the cap, 
gripped the firm hand of Lar Radnu. 

“T have been taking the orders of 
Dakkil Kun,” said Lar Radnu, in a 
shaken voice, “because there was no al- 
ternative, no opportunity to fight. I 


asked Ken, “does this 


might have killed myself, as did the late 
Lhundar, but for some mad hope——” 
His voice broke. 

“Until this moment,” said Ken, when 
he could speak, “all our plans seemed 
folly. Now we have a chance to win.” 

“Yet it is a slender chance,” reminded 
Lar Radnu. “Dakkil Kun still guards 
the great okal in the fortresses of Ny- 
dron. The black ships of the flame 
creatures are still at his command. And 
the xyli have still the power, whenever 
they will, to flood all the planets with 
heat. 

“For all we have done and all we 
can do, mankind may perish yet, like 
midges in a furnace.” 


VI. 


THE MASS of the fortress fell 
away. It became a white polygon 
against the dark waste of Kardon’s 
burned, lifeless landscape. Against the 
white flame of the pitiless sky, nine 
geodesic ships floated upward, envel- 
oped in the argent, shimmering bubbles 
of their dynamic space shells. 

“A black ship!” The warning elec- 
trified the fleet. “A spy!” 

But the briefly glimpsed flier of the 
xyli was gone when the fleet slipped 
through the eon-weakened, gradually 
collapsing etheric sphere in which Kar- 
don had been born and came again into 
the solar photosphere. 

An unreal globe of burning silver, 
the prison planet fell away behind. The 
fleet swept onward through the Sun— 
through a featureless void of golden 
flame, measured in millions of miles. 
Through a sea of fire, torn by the ter- 
rific scarlet storms of Sun-spots, broken 
only by the minute islands of the plan- 
ets, it drove toward Nydron. 

Days went by. The mother planet 
swam at last into view—a white spark 
wrapped in xanthic flame. It grew to 
be a gigantic globe of polished silver. 
Then the ultrawave operator brought 


ISLANDS OF THE SUN 37 


Ken Darren a message that ended all 
hope of surprising Dakkil Kun. 


To Ken Darren, slave, and the vermin 
with him: 

My greetings, and make yourselves 
ready to die. For your rebellion and the 
treason of Lar Radnu have been antici- 
pated, and the xyli, my loyal allies, are 
prepared to defend the planets they have 
purchased and paid for. 

Dakkil Kun, Lhundar of the Planets. 


Another hour, and the black ships 
followed. 

Standing in the long control room, 
Ken Darren was watching one of the 
great vision disks. An abyss of hot, 
golden radiance filled it—the illimitable 
fiery sea of the Sun. Nydron, within 
the silvery splendor of her protecting 
etheric sphere, hung like a white bubble 
in that gulf of flame. 

Out of that bubble came the ships 
of the xyli. 

They were black specks, scores of 
them. They grew into the arrows of 
Their glint- 


slender, tapering vessels. 
ing, dark sides were marked with rows 


of ports. At the sharp stern of each 
flickered the hot violet of its propulsion 
disk. They were gigantic, and they 
moved with the grace and the swiftness 
of a strange, incredible power. 

Watching them, Ken drew in his 
breath with awe-struck, unwilling ad- 
miration. 

“They are beautiful,” he whispered, 
“and dreadful. Like the patterned ser- 
pents of the hills of Pylos. And the 
builders of them are to be the masters 
of the planets when mankind is dead.” 

Then a faint and misty cone of light 
reached out from the bow of one black 
ship. The color of it was a deep orange, 
verging upon redness. It fastened upon 
one geodesic flier, the Explorer. The 
attacked ship veered back and forth a 
little. But its movements were clumsy ; 
It quickly became helpless. 

The cone seemed to thicken; it dark- 
ened, curdled. And the silvery en- 


velope of the dynamic space shell ab- 
ruptly vanished from the Explorer. 

Its naked, riveted hull was at first 
starkly black against the golden flame 
of the Sun. But it began to glow 
quickly and increasingly red, heated by 
the terrific radiation. Abruptly it 
sagged off its course and fell toward 
the fiery core of the Sun. 

In a frantic voice, Ken spoke into 
the tube which connected with Teddu 
Len. The old scientist was with his 
penetrator which had been installed in 
a turret in the hull. 

“Teddu!” he cried. “Do you see the 
Explorer? It is falling.” 

A thinned, metallic rasp—the old 
man’s voice—came back from a vibrat- 
ing diaphragm: 

“Yes, Ken, I see. The orange ray 
breaks up the space shell with the inter- 
ference of a heterodyning field. Power 
of propulsion is lost with the tripolar 
field, and the ship is shielded no longer 
from the solar gravitation " 

Maddened by the detached, scientific 
calm of the old man’s voice, Ken broke 
in: “Can’t you do something? The 
heat will be through her hull in mo- 
ments ¥ 

Horror choked off his voice as he 
watched the falling flier. The orange 
cone had swung down to follow its 
plunging flight. Its doomed hull was a 
vivid, canary yellow, now. He shud- 
dered, picturing the oven within it, its 
crew shrieking, dying, roasting. 

“No, I can’t save it,” rasped the old 
voice from the diaphragm. 

And beneath its calm, Ken now 
sensed the agony of sympathy; he real- 
ized that the scientist, for all his cool 
self-control, was suffering with those 
tortured men. 

“T had not anticipated that they could 
strike so quickly—so dreadfully,” said 
that dull voice of pain. “The pene- 
trator wasn’t ready. The deflector fields 
are building up now, with the subelec- 
tronic wave. The atomic power is so 


38 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


intense that no metal can withstand it. 
It must be generated and directed past 
the dynamic shell by curves in space 
itself. The subelectronic wave creates 
a tube field through hyperspace ” 

The words ended in a sob of pain. 

Ken was watching the Explorer. Her 
hull was blue-white now, and swiftly 
dwindling far below, as it hurtled down 
into the Sun’s intolerable abyss. The 
orange ray suddenly left it, flickered out. 
And the doomed flier flattened, col- 
lapsed, and melted into a brief flare of 
colored flame. 

An instant, and no trace remained of 
the ship within the xanthic void. 

“The deflector fields are generated,” 
rasped the voice of Teddu Len. “In 
a moment—now——” 


AS that quiet, deadly word whispered 
from the speaker, Ken looked back into 
the golden disk of the screen. His eye 


caught the briefest flash, as if a needle- 
thin, white blade had darted from the 
Victory, his own ship, toward the long, 


black cylinder of the murderer. 


Immediately, where that instantly 
vanishing white needle had touched, the 
black hull glowed with intolerable white- 
ness. A disk of white radiance spread, 
inconceivably hotter than the golden 
flame of the Sun. The black hull, 
crushed by terrific forces, its fragments 
fusing, crumpling, was swallowed in 
that expanding brightness. 

The white glow slowly faded against 
the golden gulf. And when it was gone, 
no trace remained of the black vessel, 
marvelously refractory to heat though 
the alloys of its hull had been. 

While that whiteness still flamed, the 
calm voice of Teddu Len spoke again: 

“The penetrator is successful. The 
effect exceeds my expectations. It is 
equivalent to the instantaneous atomic 
disruption of half a pound of copper 
within the enemy hull. The accumu- 
lators can be charged and discharged 


every fourteen seconds, so long as our 
supply of copper lasts.” 

His voice was still vibrating from the 
diaphragm when that white, blinding 
needle of light stabbed briefly out again, 
and another black arrow was converted 
into an orb of white flame. 

“Now,” the thin voice rasped again, 
“they will attack the Victory. They 
must realize that we carry the only 
weapon.” 

True, from the four nearest of the 
black ships, the misty, expanding cones 
of orange radiance reached out. Their 
meshing funnels caught the Victory, 
Each of them thickened toward redness, 

Instantly, above Ken, the vision 
screens blazed with white light, and 
then went black. He knew that the 
shielding space shell was already gone, 
that it was the full impact of the Sun’s 
radiation which had burned out the am- 
plifiers. 

Warning lights sprang out, many- 
colored, in the sudden darkness. Alarm 
gongs clanged. The tortured ship was 
protesting the consuming breath of the 
Sun against her naked hull. She was 
blind, disabled. 

Ken felt the ship veer and plunge, 
as a voice quavered out of the dark, 
thin with terror: “The drive field is 
gone! We're falling after the Ex- 
plorer.” 

Teddu Len, in his exposed turret, 
would be helpless, first to perish. 

From somewhere came a thick, sob 
bing scream: “The heat—heat—kill 
ing me!” 

Ken Darren staggered blunderingly 
forward through the confusing dark- 
ness, then stopped himself, trembling. 
This, he knew, must be the end. Oddly, 
it mattered little that it was the end of 
himself. It was the end of the plan 
to save the planets, that was what 
counted. It was the end of mankind. 

He stood there in the dark, helpless, 
momentarily expecting the hot breath of 
death. His personal regrets were two: 


» Our 


n the 
ding 
gain, 
erted 


gain, 
They 
only 


| the 
‘ones 
Their 
tory. 
ness, 
ision 

and 
the 
zone, 
Sun's 


ISLANDS OF THE SUN 39 


He was sorry that he should never again 
know the beauty of the great okal. And 
he regretted the murdered loveliness of 
the lost Wyndonee. 

Then out of the darkness came the 
casp of Teddu Len’s voice: 

“That is the fourth. Restore the 
space shell before the hull is too hot. 
Fortunately, I had set up a secondary 
shell to shield my turret. That kept 
them from blinding me or interfering 
with the penetrator.” 

Men were suddenly busy in the dark- 
ness ; panic became efficient order. The 
vision screens flashed back into radi- 
ance. And Ken knew that death was 
put away again. 

Above the argent bubble of Nydron 
still hung the black arrows—most of 
them. But the nearest five now, were 
merely fading disks of white flame. As 
he looked, another was consumed. 

“That,” said Teddu Len, “should be 
enough.” 

And Ken saw, in a moment, that the 
black arrows were wheeling, retreating. 
Two more were caught as they fied 
away into the higher levels of the photo- 
sphere, toward the weird, colossal fly- 
ing cities of the xyli. 

The eight surviving geodesic fliers 
drove on, presently, toward the silvery 
envelope of Nydron. 

“Without the xyli, Dakkil Kun is 
doomed,”’ Ken Darren told Teddu Len, 
drunk with the elation of victory. “The 
people will surely rise to aid us. When 
Dakkil Kun is crushed, and the okal 
recovered, every man will work to help 
build the field units for the planets. 
We'll have them driving up out of the 
Sun before a hundred days have gone. 

“And Dakkil Kun,” he muttered 
grimly, “will pay for what he did to 
Wyndonee.” 

Teddu Len, standing over his pene- 
trator, rubbed his lean chin, doubtfully. 

“The xyli retreated,” he said slowly. 
“But they aren’t conquered. They 
might have destroyed us in a concerted 


attack. They simply chose to wait. 
They must still desire the planets, with 
their safety from the solar storms. 

“No,” he repeated, “we shall meet 
the flame creatures again. Nor, I sus- 
pect,” he added, “has Dakkil Kun shot 
his last bolt.” 

His gloomy predictions were justi- 
fied, a day later, when the eight ships 
descended into their cradles upon the 
great field by Kothri. 

No attempt had been made to oppose 
the landing. Teddu Len’s long vigil by 
the penetrator had been needless. When 
the Victory’s air-lock opened, Ken has- 
tened out to meet a group of officers on 
the field. 


THAT MOMENT, when he should 
set foot on Nydron, was one that long 
had lived before him. He was elated 
with victory, proud of the fleet and the 
hardy men behind him. 

The sky of Nydron was a pale dome 
of silver; the cool air refreshed him 
with the tonic of eternal spring. Ken 
stood for a moment, filling his lungs 
joyously and looking across the great 
field where the Titanic reddish globes 
of geodesic fliers lay motionless in their 
cradles. 

Beyond the field he could see the 
towers of Kothri—slender, fluted col- 
umns of argent, resting upon broad, 
truncated pyramids that were terraced 
with greenery and vivid bloom. Tears 
started into his eyes; the tension of 
emotion closed over his chest. Always 
he had desired to come to Kothri, so. 

A shadow darkened his face, then, 
and bitterness lined it. And he shud- 
dered with the sudden agony gnawing 
in his breast. For the slender, blue- 
eyed loveliness of Wyndonee had come 
back to him, and the soft huskiness of 
her voice had whispered at his ear. 

And he knew, abruptly, that he had 
wished to come to Kothri because it 
was her home. And all his elation 


40 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


turned to corrosive bitterness because 
her loveliness was dead. 

He stood there, lost in pain. And 
bleak centuries seemed to flow past him. 
Despair sank its cold fingers into his 
throat. Then he flung his head, seek- 
ing to recover himself, and strode for- 
ward to meet the group of eager, wek 
coming officials. 

“I am Marron Blen, Underlord of 
Kothri,” began one portly personage. 
He was gaudy in colored silks ; his voice 
had an oily thickness. “On behalf of 
my city, I thank you for repelling the 
fleets of the xyli, and for ridding us of 
our oppressor, the tyrant Dakkil Kun 
who——” 

“Where is Dakkil Kun?” Ken’s sharp 
question cut in. 

“Dakkil Kun is gone,” said Marron 
Blen, a little affronted at the interrup- 
tion. “The dictator has fled.” 

“Fled?” rapped Ken. “Where?” 

“A private geodesic flier had been 
built for him in the yards here,” said 
the official. “The largest ever built. 


It is armed with the weapons of the 


xyli. It carries supplies enough to last 
generations. Everything a 

“He has escaped?” Ken again inter- 
rupted. “In that?” 

“He has gone. All was ready. When 
you defeated his allies in the battle be- 
yond the etheric sphere, the tyrant knew 
that all was lost. He went aboard with 
the criminal gang he brought from the 
prison planet, with their slaves and 
women ‘a 

“Where did he go?” 

“Who knows?” Marron  Blen 
shrugged, obviously displeased at Ken’s 
incisive manner. “At full power, they 
drove out through the etheric sphere. 
They were moving in the direction of 
the cities of the xyli, above.” 

Ken looked back toward the loom- 
ing, rugged, copper-red hull of the 
Victory. 

, “We must pursue—if it isn’t already 
too late.” 


“But why?” demanded the piqued 
official. ‘You have delivered us. We 
are well rid of Dakkil Kun.” 

“He has a jewel of okal,’ Ken ex- 
plained swiftly. “We must take it back 
from him. If we fail to recover it, it 
means the death of every planet, by 
fire.” 

“Nonsense!” puffed the portly Mar- 
ron Blen. “The xyli wanted the plan- 
ets for themselves—but they are de- 
feated. You routed their black fleet. 
We are safe.” 

“Safe?” echoed Ken. 
sky.” 

His keen eyes had noted the flicker. 
The pallid, silver sky had become 
brighter, at first imperceptibly, but ever 
more swiftly. White flame flushed it, 
growing more intense. Ken fancied a 
sudden, new heat in the air against his 
cheek. 

“What is this?” muttered Marron 
Blen. The red of annoyance was fad- 
ing from his thick jowls. His pasty 
face became a sickly white. Weakly, 
he stammered: “The sky! It’s blind- 
ing! What does this mean?” 

“Dakkil Kun sold the planets to the 
flame creatures,” Ken briefly reminded 
him. “According to the bargain, they 
were not to claim them until Dakkil 
Kun was dead. But now that he has 
run off upon the ship where he must 
mean to spend the rest of his life, they 
have already turned their rays upon 
the etheric sphere. And now that the 
etheric sphere has been weakened, it 
can never be restored. 

“You see the flame in the sky. It 
will remain there, until all life is swept 
from Nydron. Until every tree and 
shrub, every clump of grass, every 
building of man, bursts into flame. It 
will blaze until the dead continents are 
black deserts, and the seas dried to 
wastes of salt. Until the mountains 
begin to fuse and run down in rivers 
of lava. 

“And when it is hot enough, the flame 


“Look at the 


ISLANDS OF THE SUN 


“We must lose Lar Radnu and bring back to Kothri the lost Wyndonee.” 


42 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


creatures will bring their cities here, 
for safety from the storms of the Sun.” 
“Impossible,” whispered the fat man. 
Gazing blankly into the new, hot white- 
ness of the sky, he mopped sweat from 
his flaccid face. Incredulously, he 
shook the puffy ball of his head. “That 
cannot be. You're a madman.” 
“No,” Ken Darren told him, grimly, 
“Dakkil Kun is the madman. And his 
madness has destroyed the human race.” 


VII. 


BACK within the air-lock, Ken Dar- 
ren met the alert young admiral, Lar 
Dadnu, and thin, old Teddu Len. Their 
grave, anxious faces told him that they 
knew. 

“The heat has come,” he said. 

The old scientist nodded wearily. 
“The okal?” he asked. 

“Dakkil Kun has fled, in a new ship. 
He must have taken it.” And Ken 
asked, anxiously: “Is there time, still 
—to save the planets ?” 


“Possibly,” said the old man, slowly. 
“By conscripting every man, every ma- 
chine, every resource. 

“But we must have the okal,” he 


added. “Nothing can save a single 
planet, unless it is recovered. There 
are others, but all of them together 
would not yield power enough to lift 
the smallest planet.” 

“Then we'll get it,” said Ken, grimly. 
“Even if we have to follow Dakkil Kun 
all the way to the flying cities of the 
flame beings.” 

He looked at trim, slender Lar 
Radnu. The dark eyes of the young 
admiral flashed in reply to his glance. 
The composure of his scar-disfigured 
face was twisted by a quiet little smile. 

“We will,” said Lar Radnu, gravely. 

His artistically small hand gripped 
Ken’s, warmly. 

“We can try,” said Teddu Len. “But 
remember—we haven't met the full 
strength of the xyli. When we met 


their fleet, they retired to prevent fur- 
ther losses. But they must have far 
greater weapons to defend their cities. 
We couldn’t hope to enter them, and 
live. We can only hope to overtake 
Dakkil Kun before he finds refuge 
there.” 

“And his new ship,” whispered Lar 
Radnu, soberly, “must be as fast as the 
Victory.” 

“We must recover the okal, some- 
how,” replied Ken. “Let’s go.” 

The air-lock was soon sealed, the 
dynamic space shell snapped about the 
hull. And the great field dropped away, 
until the huge ships lying there looked 
small as eggs in a nest. The emerald 
terraces and white towers of Kothri 
dwindled to a neat, checkered pattern. 
The planet’s etheric envelope, blazing 
with white radiance, flickered behind. 

The Victory leaped upward again, 
through the golden flame of the photo- 
sphere. The sphere of white Nydron 
dropped away beneath it; it became an 
unreal silvery ghost; it was swallowed 
in xanthic fire-mist. 

An anxious day dragged away. 

Searching the golden void that filled 
the vision panel, using the utmost pene- 
tration and magnification of the ampli- 
fication circuits, Ken at last discovered 
the fugitive flier. It was a minute pin 
point of silver, thickly veiled in the 
glowing mists. 

Hour upon hour he manipulated the 
controls to hold it upon the screen 
while the Victory drove on toward it 
at her utmost speed. Again and again 
he lost it in some thickening of the 
xanthic haze; it never appeared nearer. 

“Their speed is at least as great as 
ours,” he reported to Teddu Len. “And 
I think they know we are following. 
We'll never overtake them before they 
find safety in the flying cities of the 
xyli.” 

He stood in the little armored turret 
in the hull, staring dejectedly down at 
the stooped figure of the old scientist 


ISLANDS OF THE SUN 


who was busy with the intricate mech- 
anism of his penetrator. 

“There is something,” replied Teddu 
Len, speaking absently, without looking 
up, “that I can try. An adaptation of 
the tube-field set up through hyper- 
space by my subelectronic wave. I can 
penetrate their dynamic space shell, tap 
the tripolar field that drives them d 

His voice trailed away as his fingers 
completed some adjustment, and his 
mind found a new problem. And pres- 
ently his strange tubes glowed again; 
and the tiny okal flamed with the pure 
light of a star. <A rustling whisper 
filled the small turret. 

In the vision screen, a pale finger of 
greenish -light was visible. Reaching 
out from the Victory, it seemed to dis- 
solve in the golden void. Watching the 
white mote of the fleeing ship, Ken saw 
it pause in its flight. 

“You have stopped them!” he called 
eagerly. “How?” 

“I’m draining away the energy of 
their drive field. With the full power 
at my command, I could send them 
plunging toward destruction in the core 
of the Sun.” 


THE Victory bore down upon the 
helpless fugitive. It was a ball of sil- 
ver, swung in the gulf of golden flame. 
Far above it, beyond it, were dark 
shadows, odd cloudy masses floating 
high in the void. 

“Those shadows,” said Lar Radnu, 
are the cities of the xyli—their 
strange flying dwellings, built of the 
same black alloys as their ships. If 
Dakkil Kun had reached them, he might 
have found safety.” 

Ken dispatched a message upon the 
ultrawave signal ray to the other flier: 


“ 


Dakkil Kun: We demand that you sur- 
render the great okal. Allow us to ap- 
proach and expand our space shell to in- 
close both fliers, so that we may take it 
aboard through joined air-locks. Do so, 
and you may go free. 


Then came the taunting reply: 


Ken Darren, slave: If you want the 
okal, find it. If you still desire Princess 
Wyndonee, know that you shall soon be 
with her—in death! And know that my 
allies, the xyli, can defend what is theirs. 


Ken dispatched an immediate an- 
swer: 


You are at our mercy. You cannot es- 
cape. We have a weapon which would 
obliterate your ship in an instant. Sur- 
render the jewel and save your lives. 


The reply to this was a cone of misty 
orange radiance—the ray reaching out 
to strip away the shield of the Victory’s 
space shell, exposing her hull to the 
heat of the Sun. 

A white blade of flame flickered out 
from the penetrator, probed the silvery 
bubble of the other flier. And the 
orange cone ceased to exist. 

“A judiciously adjusted discharge,” 
commented Teddu Len. “It must have 
fused the piece of apparatus com- 
pletely.” 

A few minutes later another message 
came over the ultrawave. Even in the 
cold words, Ken could sense the mad, 
consuming hatred that had wrung all 
the warm blood of humanity out of 
Dakkil Kun,had left but a grim de- 
stroyer. 


We are helpless. Yet you are at our 
mercy. I cannot escape; I cannot fight. 
But I can die—as you will die, and the 
rest of your vermin called men. If you 
think the great okal would save you— 
find it. 


Even as Ken looked up from the 
message to the golden disk of the screen, 
he saw the bright sphere of the space 
shell flicker away from the other flier. 

Its naked hull plunged downward 
through the yellow abyss. At first it 
was starkly black; in a moment it was 
glowing cherry-red. Beneath the ter- 
tific acceleration of solar gravitation, it 


“4 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


was hurtling toward the unendurable 
heart of the Sun. 

For a moment Ken staggered, 
numbed, shaken with horror at this last, 
suicidal gesture of hatred. 

Then he sprang toward Lar Radnu. 

“Put the Victory beside it,’ he 
shouted. “Expand our dynamic shell 
to inclose both ships. We'll storm their 
air-lock and search for the okal.” 

“The shell will be weakened by the 
expansion,” objected Lar Radnu. “Our 
field can’t support both ships. The Vic- 
tory will fall with them. There will be 
increasing leakage of radiation. The 
time will be short—and we in danger 
of perishing with them.” 

“We must try,” said Ken. 

But Lar Radnu already was giving 
swiftly-voiced commands. 

Air-lock was sealed against air-lock, 
within the space shell weakened by ex- 
pansion. As both ships continued to 
plunge into the core of the Sun, their 
hulls heating under the radiation leaking 
through, neutron blasts cut a way 
through the metal valve. 

Ghastly silence greeted Ken as he 
led a party aboard to search for the 
great okal. The doomed crew had not 
waited to die in the collapse of their 
fusing vessel. Dead men and women 
stared at the intruders, some still clutch- 
ing the weapons with which they had 
destroyed themselves. 

High in the silent hulk, however, Ken 
heard a wail of music. It led him into 
a magnificent, barbarically splendid 
chamber, gaudily rich with jeweled tap- 
estries. Pallid, rosy light streamed 
down through cool, perfumed air. 

In the middle of the room was a long 
table, set with glittering crystal and pol- 
ished metal, burdened with elaborate 
pastries and vivid-hued fruits and tall 
flagons of wine. Two score men and 
women sat at that silent board, glitter- 
ing in the plundered wealth of Kothri, 
gorgeously jeweled and gowned and 


painted. 


Dakkil Kun sat at the middle of the 
table, and of the forty, only he was 
living. Upon either hand was a woman 
who had been beautiful, already rigid 
and glassy-eyed in death. He rose 
when Ken entered the room, in his 
thick, hairy hand an emerald cup of 
pale wine. 

Ken had not seen him since that day 
upon Pylos when they had killed the 
tiger in the cavern and Ken had found 
the great okal. But still he looked the 
same: a squat and massive giant, blue- 
black of hair, his swarthy skin bulging 
with thick muscles. His eyes, dark and 
quick and small as always, held a feral 
wildness. His heavy, cruel-lipped face 
bore a slow and leering grin, stamped 
with the cunning of insanity. 

He stood there, smiling queerly at 
Ken. One thick, dark hand rested in- 
solently upon the cold, marble shoulder 
of the corpse at his left; with a mock- 
ing gesture, the other held high the em- 
erald cup. 

“Welcome, Ken Darren, my old com- 
panion,” he said thickly. 

His voice was the voice of a man 
very drunk—not with wine only, but 
with mad passion and consuming, tri- 
umphant hate. 

“You are late for my final feast,” he 
said. “But come and sit with me—in 
the arms of my lovely companion.” 

And he waved the green cup un- 
steadily, toward the dead woman at his 
right. 

“Sit and drink. The wine is poi- 
soned. But this is the time, of all times, 
to drink poisoned wine.” 


KEN was trembling, sick with the 


horror of this mad tableau. But he 
forced himself to step forward, to speak 
persuasively : 

“Dakkil, please listen to me! If you 
care nothing for mankind, listen for the 
sake of our old friendship.” 

“Of course you are my friend, Ken,” 


ISLANDS OF THE SUN 45 


came the thick, drunken voice. “Come 
and drink.” 

“Listen, Dakkil,” pleaded Ken, fight- 
ing down his revulsion. “Give me the 
great okal. With that, we can lift the 
planets out of the Sun—to safety.” 

Dakkil Kun shook his heavy head, 
slowly, so that it lolled alarmingly. 

“The planets aren’t yours,” he said 
thickly. “I sold them to the xyli—for 
this.” 

He gestured clumsily with the em- 
erald cup, down the long and richly 
laden table, at the stiff, ghastly-eyed 
company of gayly clad dead, at the jew- 
eled tapestries beyond. 

“They gave me all that I desired 
when I was a lonely slave on Pylos,” 
he said. “And I am content. I will 
not cheat them.” 

“You won't give up the jewel?” 
asked Ken, in despair. 

“If you want it, find it.” He chuck- 
led thickly. “But you must hasten. It 
is already growing hot—I must leave 
you.” 


He drained the emerald cup. 

Ken leaped forward, seized his heavy 
shoulder, spun him away from the table 
of corpses. 

“Tell me,” he gasped urgently, “tell 
a 


’ He had meant to demand the okal, 

but it was another question that rasped 

out: “What became of Wyndonee?” 
“Find out 2 


The mocking whisper was strangled. 
The heavy body jerked convulsively 
from his hands and lurched to the table 
of the dead. 

Struggling to subdue his horror and 
despair, Ken was vainly searching for 
the great okal behind the gemmed tapes- 
tries, when the urgent voice of stout 
little Sin] Mran spoke into the silent 
room of death: 

“We must go, Ken. Lar Radnu 
sends word that the expanded space 
shell will endure no longer.” 


“No use to go,” muttered Ken hope- 
lessly, “without the jewel.” 

And he kept up his desperate, aim- 
less search, stifling in air increasingly 
hot, until Sin! Mran and another 
dragged him back through the wrecked 
air-lock. 

The doomed hull was released. It 
fell away from the Victory, into the 
inferno of the Sun’s heart. While the 
Victory fought for her life, Ken stood, 
listless, limp with hopeless despair, 
watching the wreck. Dwindling as it 
plunged away, it changed from orange- 
red to yellow; it became blue-white. It 
flowed, flattened. A swirl of flaming 
vapor, it was lost in the golden chasm. 

All it contained, even the refractory 
crystal of okal, Ken knew, was now 
reduced to elemental atoms. And even 
those atoms were half stripped of or- 
bital electrons in the terrific furnace of 
the Sun. 

And Ken’s hopes were lost with the 
okal, and the hopes of the human race. 


VIII. 


GLUM, silent despair rode the Vic- 
tory as she drove back toward doomed 
Nydron. 

Wearily, hopelessly, Ken paced the 
long control room. His eyes were red 
from lack of sleep, his face drawn and 
haggard. His shoulders stooped from 
the burden of a task that had been too 
heavy. And he had smiled a little, bit- 
terly, to see a few gray hairs in his 
temple. 

“T should have drunk the poisoned 
wine,” he muttered, once. 

Yet fits of wild, irrational hope still 
seized him. 

“Without the okal,” once he asked 
Teddu Len, “there’s no chance?” 

“None.” The heartless old scientist 
shook his lean, gray head. “The thou- 
sand generations of our science have 
failed to liberate atomic power without 
the aid of the okal.” 


46 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


“It wouldn’t be possible to make 
one ?” 

“No. Experiments in that direction 
were abandoned after a hundred gen- 
erations. Okals, you know, are not allo- 
trope of carbon. We believe they were 
formed when the planets were given 
birth, deep in the Sun’s core. Then, 
under unthinkable pressures and tem- 
peratures, and in a warped space we 
could never duplicate in the laboratory, 
matter burst out of the universe, and 
was instantly chilled, by expansion, in 
its new subspace. No, only a new, giant 
Sun can make an okal. 

“Nor is there any thinkable possi- 
bility that another, large enough, will 
be discovered. Yours is the only one 
ever found that would have been of 
any use. 

“A superstitious man,” he mused, 
“might believe that yours was created 
for our needs, and then taken away as 
a punishment for the social injustice 
that made Dakkil Kun into the inhuman 
monster that he was. 


“Anyhow,” he finished, his old voice 
low with bitter, despairing finality, “the 


okal is gone. And with it, our hope.” 

The Victory descended once more be- 
side the towers of Kothri. 

Leaving the ship, Ken was appalled 
at the havoc a few days had wrought. 
The sky, once pale, cool silver, was now 
an eternal dome of pitiless, white flame. 
The air stung the nostrils with hot dust. 
The terraces of Kothri, once so green, 
were sere and black from heat. 

Rain had ceased to fall, he learned. 
Rivers were failing already, lakes 
shrinking. Dust everywhere, carried 
on searing winds, blighted woodland 
and field. 

Terrible, upon the people he saw, was 
the shadow of death. Every face was 
lined and gaunt. Eyes were inflamed 
from the frightful glare, skins blistered 
by the merciless radiation. And every 
face was hideous with the stamp of 
doom, twisted with devouring fear, mad 


with that ultimate insanity that con- 
quers when hope is dead. 

No planet, he learned, had escaped. 
Even ringed Synthrar, and colossal, 
far-distant Bellydron, had reported by 
ultrawave from their scattered colonies 
that the skies had turned to white flame, 
that cataclysm of fire was at hand. 

Pain of grief and despair pulsed in 
Ken’s throat as he returned to the Vic- 
tory. Tears smarted in his inflamed 
eyes; his gaunt body was racked with 
dry, ungovernable sobs. 

“Always,” he gasped bitterly to 
Teddu Len, in the control room, “I have 
wanted to come to Kothri. Always its 
slender, white towers and its bright, 
hanging gardens have been a promise 
to me. I have seen it every moment, 
in my mind, and Wyndonee there. 

“Dakkil Kun destroyed her. And 
Kothri now is burned and doomed. 
Wyndonee and Kothri 43 

His lips stiffened, and the agony pul- 
sating in his throat cut off his speech. 
He turned silently away from the old 
man, his lean body jerking with voice- 
less sobs. 

“There is little disorder, yet,” said 
Teddu Len, presently, speaking with the 
calm of a scientist. ‘Men are dazed, 
still. When the reaction comes; civili- 
zation will be gone in a day.” 

Ken listened silently. His sobbing 
had ceased. His emotion had burned 
itself out and burned the heart out of 
him, leaving only a stiff automaton. 

“Rioting, pillage, arson,” Teddu Len 
went on dully; “murder, outrage, sui- 
cide—madness will pile them on us, be- 
fore the end. And the end itself will 
be soon. Life will not be possible in 
the open air beyond a hundred days, I 
think. In air-conditioned buildings, a 
few may live another hundred. 

“Still,” he added, “there might be 
time—if we had the okal. The com- 
mon task, the common hope, would hold 
civilization together.” 

“T had a search made at the palace,” 


ISLANDS OF THE SUN 47 


Ken told him, in a dry, listless tone. 
“After all, we don’t know that he took 
the jewel aboard with him, though he 
must have done so. But it was fo use. 
None of the servants or guards had s¢en 
the jewel—none had so much as heard 
of it “ 

He stopped, quivering, electrified. 
He gasped, and one arm thrust stiffly 
out. For a moment he stood rigid, then 
eager life flowed back into his exhausted 
frame. 

To Lar Radnu, entering the control 
room, he shouted: “Prepare the Vic- 
tory for a flight to Pylos, immedi- 
ately.” 

To Teddu Len, he said: 
with your plans. 


“Get off, 
Set every man and 


every machine to work, buildimg your 
field units. 
“What ?” 
“Where——” 
But Ken, in frantic haste, was al- 
ready pushing him out of the room. 
The Victory came down upon Pylos. 


I am going after the okal.” 
gasped the old man. 


FOLLOWING the directions of 
Ken, Lar Radnu dropped it into a lit- 
tle, sandy glade. He snapped off the 
dynamic space shell and the great red- 
dish hull settled heavily, but unharmed, 
against the surface. 

“All my boyhood was spent in these 
hills,” Ken told him. ‘“Dakkil Kun and 
I often drove our herds across this very 
spot. The cavern opens from that lit- 
tle canyon, below. Let’s go.” 

The two hastened from the air-lock 
into the hot atmosphere of Pylos. 
Ken’s shoulders were erect now. And 
the slender young admiral had caught 
his confidence; his scar-twisted, thin 
face was alight with courage. 

Pylos had changed. Its silver sky 
had become an inverted bowl of incan- 
descence; its air was the scorching 
breath of conflagration; its vegetation 
was already sere and dead with the win- 
ter of heat. The hot desolation fell like 
a crushing hand on Ken’s spirit. 


“Folly brought me up here,” he mut- 
tered gloomily. ‘““What I hoped—could 
not be.” 

Panting and sweating in the dusty 
heat, eyes smarting from the unending 
savagery of the glaring sky, they toiled 
across a little rounded plateau and 
scrambled down into the narrow crevice 
of the canyon, where sultry heat was 
like a searing fluid. 

“Once ferns grew here,” gasped Ken. 
“The heat has destroyed them.” He 
pointed at the dark slit of an opening. 
“The cavern they hid.” 

Lighting their way with the green- 
ish rays of hand photon disks, they en- 
tered the grateful cool of the cave, feet 
splashing in the diminishing trickle of 
the stream. 

Ken stumbled against the bleached 
roundness of an animal’s skull. 

“We killed the tiger here,” he said. 
“The chamber of the okal is beyond.” 

Stooping to creep through the nar- 
rowing passage, they came at last into 
the oval glory of the inner chamber. 
The green of their photon lights re- 
verberated in many matchless hues from 
its crystalline walls. It burned in milk- 
white opalescence upon the clean sand 
of the floor, where the spring welled up. 

Again, from a cause that he could 
never explain, Ken felt the puzzling 
emotion that had overwhelmed him on 
his first entrance to the cavern—a stimu- 
lating elation, a sense of intoxicating 
joy and satisfaction. 

For a moment he stood, surrendered 
to that flood of unidentifiable exaltation, 
his eyes closed, his breath swift, his 
heart leaping in his chest. He reached 
out and caught the firm hand of Lar 
Radnu, instinctively driven to share 
that supernal instant. 

Then the urgencies of the moment 
restored his purpose. 

“The okal is here,”’ he whispered. “It 
must be.” 

He fell upon his knees, delving in the 
white. wet sand. 


48 


“How do you know?” asked Lar 
Radnu, with a curious softness in his 
voice. 

“Dakkil Kun, so far as I can learn, 
never showed the okal to any man,” 
said Ken. “He never spoke of it. He 
certainly didn’t use it in his rise to 
power. 

“Then there is no reason to think 
he took it away from Pylos. And, I 
see now, it would have been unwise of 
him to take it when he left, perhaps 
impossible. It is too large to be con- 
cealed easily. And the company police 
were always alert for such things.” 

His voice grew slow as his mind went 
back to his task. 

“T think he must have hidden the 
jewel on Pylos. And what spot could 
be safer than this hidden cavern in 
which it had rested undisturbed from 
the dawn of time? Finally, remember 
his repeated challenge: ‘If you want 
the okal, find it——’ ” 

His words ceased with a breathless, 
triumphant outcry. His hand had en- 
countered the smooth round of a hard 
surface beneath the wet sand—a sur- 
face which had a thrillingly familiar 
feel, oddly soaplike, cool. 

He bent low and lifted in both joy- 
ously trembling hands the peerless 
sphere of the great okal. Its heavy, per- 
fect globe was larger than his two fists. 
The contact of his flesh gave birth to 
splendid flame within it, quivering, pul- 
sating with polychromatic life. 

For a little time the two bent over 
it, breathless, silent. 

Their gaze plumbed its fathomless 
depths of pellucid wonder; their spir- 
its were laved in its living tides of pure 
color. The shafts of its incredible radi- 


ance lifted them together to heights of 
ultimate joy that they had never known. 

Then Lar Radnu whispered, softly: 
“The planets can be saved.” 

Ken Darren began to speak, in a 
low, hesitant tone. 

“I am somehow sorry to leave this 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


cave,” he said. . “A queer dread-—] 
can’t say why. I am glad for humanity, 
because we have the jewel. Yet I think 
I can never be truly happy.” 

“Why not?” asked Lar 
softly. 

“I think I told you once,” said Ken 
slowly. “Once I saw Wyndonee upon 
a visigraph screen. I suppose I am a 
fool—but since that day I have loved 
her. 

“I wanted to go to Kothri, in the 
hope that I might get a glimpse of her. 
I never dared to think of more than 
that, until the day I found the okal. 
Somehow, that gave me a new courage 
—it made me dream that Wyndonee 
might be mine. 

“But Dakkil Kun took the jewel from 
me—the jewel, and Wyndonee.” 

His voice fell away into a chasm of 
black regret. After a little time of si- 
lence, Lar Radnu began to speak slowly, 
in a soft, husky tone that was new to 
Ken. 


Radnu, 


“KEN DARREN,” he said, “I have 
come to know you well. For many 
days there has been a thing I wanted 
to reveal to you, and could not, because 
of the hideous pressure of doom.” 

“Something,” demanded Ken, eagerly, 
“something about Wyndonee ?” 

Lar Radnu nodded, smiling. 

“‘She—she’s still—alive ?” 

“She is. She escaped Dakkil Kun.” 

“But how?” whispered Ken, his joy 
half incredulous. “And where is she 
now ?” 

““Wyndonee,” said Lar Radnu, “never 
liked living at the court in Kothri. 
Ceremony bored her. She disliked the 
nobles who made love to her; they were 
greedy parasites upon society, insincere 
flatterers, emasculated by soft living. 

“Wyndonee wanted to taste life of 
a different kind, simpler, more useful. 
She made a plan, and at last brought 
her father, the Lhundar, to approve it. 
Skilled persons arranged a disguise for 


AST-—3 


ISLANDS OF THE SUN 


her—a disguise as a man. For a long 
time she wore it, practicing masculine 
jintonations of voice, masculine tricks of 
manner and posture. 

“At last, when her masquerade was 
perfect, she went aboard one of the 
Lhundar’s geodesic fliers. As a com- 
mon cadet, at first, she sailed out from 
Nydron, into the golden flame of the 
Sun. She liked the new, elemental life 
that carried her to many planets. She 
studied the intricate sciences of geo- 
desic navigation. She rose to be a petty 
officer, then captain of a flier. 

“She had a part in balking the first 
revolt of Dakkil Kun, and for that part, 
was made admiral of the fleet. In the 
second revolt, she aided her father in 
the hopeless attempt to defend Nydron 
against the black ships of the xyli, and 
surrendered with him to Dakkil Kun. 

“But Dakkil Kun, never penetrating 
the disguise, was unable to find Wyndo- 
nee, though he searched all Nydron. 
For want of trained men of his own, 
he left her in command of the fleet— 
where she aided in the search for her- 
self. Softly, Lar Radnu laughed. 

“And, Ken Darren,” the husky voice 
concluded, “you know the rest.” 

“Wyndonee,” asked Ken, faint with 
incredulous joy, “became Lar Radnu?” 

“She did,” came the whisper. 

“You—you are Wyndonee?” 

“T am,” assented the admiral. 

The low voice had become completely 
feminine. Its cool huskiness touched 
an old memory in Ken; it resounded 
through his heart. And the military 
stiffness of the slender young officer 
dissolved into the yielding, gracious 
curves of womanhood, as Ken’s trem- 
bling arms were held out. 

And the great okal, forgotten, burned 
in solitary and transcendent splendor 
upon the smooth sand that floored the 
oval chamber. 

When they left the oval chamber, 
willingly now, joyously, and hand in 
hand, but one thing troubled Ken. 

AST—4 


“The scar?” he asked. 

“Oh!” 

And his ears rejoiced to the delicious 
tinkle of Wyndonee’s laugh, a sound he 
had long yearned for, bitterly, and de- 
spaired of hearing ever again. 

“The scar will peel away,” she prom- 
ised him. “It is a kind of adhesive film 
which draws the skin, painted. If you 
wish to see me without it 4 

“T do.” 

“Then we must lose Lar Radnu, and 
you shall bring back to Kothri the lost 
Wyndonee.” 

Sight of the great okal, in Kothri, 
ushered eager youth back into the weary 
eyes of Teddu Len. 

“It will do?” Ken asked him, anx- 
iously. 

“Tt will!” 

And the scientist was an old man no 
longer. His shoulders were straight ; 
his face bright, the seams of years 
wiped from it miraculously. 

“Tt is a perfect thing,” he whispered. 
“It is larger than I had dreamed pos- 
sible. Its beauty will be the greatest 
treasure of mankind. To look into it, 
only, is reward enough for a life of 
pain.” 

“And it will save the planets?” asked 
Wyndonee, 


WYNDONEE, standing beside Ken 
Darren, was restored now to the beauty 


of his dreams. The dark pigment was 
gone from her radiant skin; the long 
scar had vanished; the admiral’s trim 
uniform had been exchanged for a blue, 
shimmering gown that accentuated 
every rich curve of her. 

The scientist’s reply kindled new ra- 
diance in the blue of her eyes. 

“Tt will, my children. It will. The 
first field units will be ready within 
forty days. This peerless jewel will 
activate copper to supply abundant 
atomic power. The units will fly like 
ships to the planets which they are to 
drive, three to each. 


50 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


“Within a hundred days, the planets 
will all be lifted above the photosphere, 
and the skies will be merciful again. 

“A few hundred days more, and they 
will be driven beyond the critical point, 
so that no more power will be needed. 
The tidal thrust of the Sun will send 
them out, and out, speeding them in 
their new orbits, so that life—our kind 
of life—may continue upon them, even 
after the collapsing etheric spheres are 

A solemn elation had come into the 
fresh youth of his voice. 

“For ages beyond all reckoning, Ken 
my son, the planets will turn about the 
Sun. And our children, upon them, 


will rise to heights of culture and hap- 
piness beyond our dreams. 

“There will be vicissitudes, disasters. 
Men may lose the power of travel be- 
“tween the planets, may sink even to 


savagery. But all life, we know, car- 
ries the germ of human intelligence. 
And the seed of man is now on every 
planet. 

“And if he falls, man will ever rise 
again.” 

His rapt eyes fell to the flaming, liv- 
ing wonder of the jewel in his hands. 

“This great crystal,” he said, “will 
endure forever. It can hardly be de- 
stroyed. And men are not likely to 
lose it—forever. Its beauty will always 
restore the upward urge, and the won- 
der of its power will give men the key 
to advancement.” 

He lifted the great, pellucid sphere 
above his silveted head, where it flamed 
like an eternal beacon. 

Ken and Wyndonee looked for a 
moment up into its fire, and then turned 
silently each to the other, entering a 
nearer, more intimate wonder. 


Intra-Planetary 


A surprising story by CHAN CORBETT 


"ey Y 


With a savage roar of vibrations the 
ranks surged through the white monster. 


f YUBO was weary and a bit afraid. 
This was his fourth journey 
through the tremendous reaches 

of outer space, yet he liked it no more 
than he had the first. Even in the new 
space skin he had recently invented and 
been the first of all his tribe to use, the 
risks were desperately great. For the 
vast emptinesses between the worlds of 
his universe were peopled ‘with strange 
terrors and unimaginable dangers. 


Tubo felt a shudder pervade the semi- 
torpid roundness of his huddled being 
as he peered through the pale translu- 
cency of the enveloping space skin. He 
was helpless, exposed to the cruel sport- 
iveness of chance. All the frantic sci- 
ence of those last feverish moments 
within the expiring world had been un- 
able to gain him the secret of motile 
navigation in space. The strong cur- 
rents that blew through the universe 


52 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


swept him about in aimless progression. 

All around, in tempting profusion, 
bathed even as he, in the strange, fierce 
glow that permeated all space, moved 
inviting worlds, elongated, breasted the 
universe currents with erratic, incalcula- 
ble orbits. How many times had he at- 
tempted to plot the path of the world 
he had recently quitted, to bring it 
within rigid mathematical laws, and 
failed? 

Ah! That last sweep had brought 
his sheathed, protoplasmic form almost 
to the very surface of a lovely, heaving 
planet. He pushed violently with all his 
uncomplicated fluidity against the hard- 
ness of the space skin in a vain attempt 
to hurl himself upon that beckoning 
surface. 

If only he could make contact, attach 
himself. In seconds he would have bur- 
rowed into one of the innumerable tun- 
nels that led from the glow-exposed sur- 
face into the soft, warm, welcoming 
darkness of the interior. Life there was 
luxurious and food was to be had for 
the gulping. 

But alas! A mocking cross-wind of 
space, a swift, incalculable swerve on 
the part of the plunging planet, and he 
was once more buffeted in emptiness. 
The terrible glow of the universe was 
beginning to take effect upon Tubo now. 
It was this inimical radiation that con- 
stituted the greatest hazard of space 
travel. It shriveled and seared and 
burned—even penetrated through the 
protective sheath in which he was en- 
folded. 

He felt his body growing hard and 
taut. His delicate senses measured the 
rate of evaporation. His mind sped 
with lightning swiftness through intri- 
cate calculations. He had five minutes 
more of universe-time before the radia- 
tions would shrivel him to a lifeless 
husk. In that period he must effect a 
landing on a proper planet, or else—— 

Tubo was a great scientist, the great- 
est of his tribe—for that matter of all 


the tribes that peopled the planets of 
space. Other tribes had better natural 
protection than his; they could form 
space skins at will from the materials 
of their own bodies. Tubo and his kind 
had no such powers. All the more 
honor to him then for inventing and 
constructing an improvement on their 
natural covering. 

And it had been Tubo who had dis- 
covered, in the depths of his laboratory, 
that the world they inhabited was a dy- 
ing world. He grimaced bitterly to 
himself even now at the thought. 

He had hoped, after three former 
forced hegiras, that this planet would 
prove his last resting place. It almost 
had—but in a different sense. He had 
been the only one to escape. All the 
others—those of his own tribe and of 
the numerous other tribes who inhabited 
the planets with them—had perished. 
A wave of resentment coursed over his 
quiescent, rounded protoplasm. 

Tubo had no organs of thought as we 
know them, no differentiation of func- 
tions. Thought was a process of the 
totality of him, so were the other func- 
tions of life; ingestion of food, evacua- 
tion of excreta, reproduction, sensory 
perceptions. There were no male and 
female in the world of Tubo, nor was 
there death except by violence or acci- 
dent. Tubo reproduced by binary fis- 
sion, a splitting along a longitudinal 
axis. Tubo was not one, he was a mil- 
lion different split personalities. 


IT WAS all the fault of those other 
tribes, he thought resentfully. Why 
didn’t they leave him and his own tribe 
alone to a planet? Why did they persist 
in following, in colonizing where they 


colonized? Tubo’s tribe ordinarily man-. 


aged a peaceful existence. 

True, the planet would sometimes 
cease its aimless, incalculable movements 
and remain quiescent in space. But 
that did not matter. Only once had a 


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INTRA-PLANETARY 53 


world succumbed into the frigidity of 
death because of them. 

In all other cases it had been the fault 
of the crowding tribes who followed 
them, who ate and drank voraciously of 
the life-giving intra-planetary fluids, 
and exhausted the wealth of natural re- 
sources within an incredibly short time. 

He would never forget the world he 
had just quitted. Just as he was com- 
fortably settled, and his laboratory set 
up according to his satisfaction, he 
recognized the symptoms of a dying 
world. He had warned the others ; they 
fiad not heeded him. He had barely 
time enough to inclose himself in his 
space suit, and hurl himself out of the 
current of the underground river into 
the swift gaseous exhalations that jerked 
with spasmodic regularity through the 
chief outer orifice of the dying world. 

He was ejected just in time. A sud- 


den swirling upheaval of subterranean 
gas thrust him violently into space, spin- 
ning and bobbing. Looking back, Tubo 
saw the elongated planet ripple all over 


its flexible surface; then it was immo- 
bile. The orifice remained a gaping 
hole, moveless and still. The subter- 
ranean explosions had ceased. No gas 
puffed out. The planet was dead. 

Tubo shuddered with the narrowness 
of his escape. His comrades, friends, 
all the inhabitants who had lived and 
jostled with him over a hundred split- 
ting generations, were doomed to a hor- 
rible, hopeless death. Imprisoned within 
the bowels of the dead world, while the 
heat of subterranean fires ebbed into 
destroying frigidity. 

The broad, warm, life-giving rivers 
slowly congealed and held their strug- 
gling forms in a movelessness from 
which there was no escape, until they 
strangled and died in dreadful, bursting 
agonies. 

Tubo was no sentimentalist. None 
of his kind was. He accepted life and 
death, especially the death of others. 
But it was striking closer and closer to 


himself each time. That last escape was 
too much by a hair’s breadth for com- 
fort. He was a scientist. Surely there 
must be some way. He stopped 
himself grimly. Time enough for that. 
Meanwhile he was in peril of immedi- 
ate dissolution. The glow was beating 
in upon him, piercing his shrinking body 
with strange agonies. In another space- 
minute, he calculated feebly 

Ah! A planet swarmed huge upon 
his vision. It was moving rapidly, rush- 
ing through the universe in an inscruta- 
ble orbit. If only A space flow 
swooped upon him, caught him in its 
vast force-thrust. It hurled him di- 
rectly teward the lunging world, directly 
toward a gaping crater which led into 
the interior, where food, security and 
life beckoned to him. 

Exultation beat through his rapidly 
desiccating frame, renewed his energies. 
Closer, closer, he was hurried, still in 
the clutch of the blessed current. Now 
he was at the very mouth of the orifice. 
It yawned before him with inviting 
blackness. Panic seized him then— 
panic and a sense of helpless suffoca- 
tion. What if he were an instant too 
soon, an instant too late! 

The planets of the universe were all 
volcanic in nature. At regular intervals 
the interior fires belched forth a hot 
effluvia, of gases. An eruption now 
would send him careening back into 
outer space, tossing and bobbing. With 
awful clarity Tubo knew that this was 
his last chance. If he missed this world, 
he would die before chance could throw 
him in the path of another. 

A faint eddy crossed the space cur- 
rent on whose bosom he was being car- 
ried. It came from the rapidly nearing 
planet. Nausea drenched his protoplas- 
mic formlessness. Was it but the 
premonitory prelude to a _ geysering 
eruption, or was it A back eddy 
sucked at him, swept him out of the 
clutches of illimitable space, pulled him 


54 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


tumbling and twisting into the maw of 
a Stygian darkness. 

Down, down the unfathomable gulf 
he dropped, like a plummet, past strange 
caverns and spongy traps, where lurked 
weird monsters whose single gulp was 
death, past them in safety, down, ever 
down, the wind of his flight whistling 
through his space skin, until, in a pale 
phosphorescent glow, he found himself 
hurtling through a series of hollow cav- 
erns, whose dark red, spongy walls glis- 
tened with a dripping dew. 


FRANTICALLY he tried to stop 
himself. This was the ideal place for 
settlement ; this was a home as good as 
the one he had just hurriedly quitted. 
Nowhere else within the recesses of this 
vast interior world would he find ex- 
istence so secure, so comfortable. 

Furthermore, during the long, terrible 
space journey, certain ideas had pulsed 
with gathering force through his being ; 
plans had matured which he wished to 
put into effect at once. 

Yet the beckoning red walls slipped 
upward with hopeless speed. In another 
instant the caverns would end, and he 
would find himself immersed in the sub- 
terranean river which would sweep him 
to remoter and more barren reaches. 
He bumped! Breathless eternity! 
Would he tear loose from this last hold, 
or would the friction between the soft 
pulp of the cavern wall and the smooth 
slipperiness of his space skin bring him 
to a halt? He cursed now the protec- 
tive covering that had brought him 
safely through his interplanetary flight. 
His naked being, viscid and semi-flow- 
ing, would have perished long before 
this caught hold. 

He quivered, swung aimlessly. The 
least shudder, and Ah! His swings 
grew shorter. The spongy wall en- 
folded him lovingly. He was being em- 
bedded. He was safe; he was home! 
He breathed a sigh of thankfulness. 

An all-wise, omnipotent Being had 


guided him safely, had peopled the 
frightening depths of space with innu- 
merable worlds, equipped to the last de- 
tail with all the necessities for life and 
continued existence. Not that he hadn’t 
heard rumors of strange planets that 
roamed the galactic universe, to all out- 
ward seeming like these kindly worlds, 
whose interiors nevertheless harbored 
strange, poisonous compounds, whose 
mysterious depths meant instant death, 
He, Tubo, had been fortunate thus far 

He set to work at once. He uncoiled 
his huddled round form, straightened it 
to the rodlike length which was his nor- 
mal shape. He pushed with all his 
strength against the resilient membrane 
of the space skin. It gave, punctured. 
With a gasp of thanksgiving he wrig- 
gled out, attached himself with a shud- 
dering ecstasy to the soft, dripping cav- 
ern wall! It felt good. The red dew 
sucked into his naked form, swelled 
him with a satisfying feeling of fruition. 

“Hello!” The vibration impacted cn 
his delicate protoplasm, wriggled him 
around toward the speaker. He was not 
alone, naturally. Not a planet in the 
universe but was tenanted with swarms 
of beings—members of his own race, 
members of other races. 

The person who had greeted him 
swung chattily from a nearby wall. He 
was not of his tribe; he was round and 
smooth and smaller. “A _ stranger 
here?” the round one asked in friendly 
fashion. 

“Yes,” Tubo told him. “My old 
world died. I’ve just come in from 
space.” 

“T know,” the other remarked sympa- 
thetically. “It’s happened to me, too 
Just as I get all set and comfortable, 
something always goes wrong with my 
planet, and I’ve got to get out in a 
hurry. I just came here myself a short 
time ago. Haven’t even had a chance 
to split up yet. But here, we haven't 
introduced ourselves. My name’s Strep- 
ton.” 


INTRA-PLANETARY 55 


“Mine’s Tubo,” the scientist said. 
“Now look 4 

But a change was taking place in 
Strepton. The round sphere of him 
commenced to quiver all over. The 
clear luminescence of his body clouded. 
The vibrations increased. Then slowly, 
at the poles of his being, two tiny in- 
dentations appeared, sank deeper and 
deeper until Tubo’s new friend was at- 
tenuated in the middle like an hourglass. 

Tubo never knew what made him jerk 
his rodlike form convulsively forward 
just then. Perhaps it was the inordinate 
keenness to vibration that had set him 
apart and made him greater than his 
fellows. But it saved his life. 

For the oval white monster who had 
pounced out of the spongy recess in 
whieh it had been lurking, missed him 
by a millimicron. Its huge, voracious 
bulk slithered on, unable to stop itself, 
straight for the splitting, reproducing 
body of Strepton. 

Tubo cried out a hoarse warning, 
knowing even as he did that it was use- 
less. Those in the throes of parturition 
were particularly helpless, unable to 
duck or dodge or squirm to safety. 

Already the white mass of the slither- 
ing monster was arching itself over the 
hapless Strepton, avid to ingest this 
toothsome morsel into its slimy depths. 
_ A last shudder coursed through the 
fissuring being. There was a rending 
sound, and Strepton broke literally into 
two. The white beast gulped. Strepton 
the Second disappeared with a horri- 
ble sucking sound. The monster slav- 
ered and rippled with glutted satisfac- 
tion, and kept on sliding down the 
trickle of red dew. In another second 
he was out of sight and the slobbering 
sound of his digestion mercifully 
quenched. 


TUBO stared .after him with trem- 
bling anger. The planets held their per- 
ils as well as the reaches of outer space. 
Give him time, a well-equipped labora- 


tory, and he would bring certain experi- 
ments on which he had already em- 
barked to fruition. Then 

The idle, chatty voice of Strepton 
broke in on his grim resentment. “Al- 
most had me that time, didn’t he?” 

Tubo swung around. “Yes,” he said 
slowly, “but he got your child.” 

Strepton gave a ripplelike shrug. 
“That’s life,” he said easily. ‘‘Besides,” 
he added humorously, “give me time 
and I'll have a thousand more.” 


Tubo had no chance to answer, for 
the inhabitants of his new world came 
swarming to bid him welcome. They 
surrounded him, and chattered and 
squeaked and wriggled—uncounted mil- 
lions of them. Fellow tribesmen, long 
and rodlike; round orbs like Strepton, 
in a thronging profusion of species ; and 
certain pallid, slinking, corkscrewing 
creatures from whom the others moved 
gingerly away. Tubo himself could not 
suppress a shudder at the sight of one 
pallid stranger who almost brushed up 
against him. 

“Stinking outlaw!’ he muttered an- 
grily to himself. There was something 
gruesomely pale and lusterless about 
them. Of all the forms of life who peo- 
pled the universe they alone slunk and 
squirmed their threadlike forms fur- 
tively along, shunning the friendly gre- 
gariousness of the others. 

The pallid shape spiralled rapidly 
near him. “You needn’t make remarks 
about me,” he squeaked. “Spira has his 
own tribe waiting for him.” With that 
he wriggled toward a colony of cork- 
screw shapes, hanging in a ghastly clus- 
ter on a neighboring wall. 

Tubo frowned, but the clamor of 
greeting swarmed around and over him. 
His fame had preceded him. There 
were those in this world whom he had 
met inside other planets, and who had 
seen his work. They murmured awed, 
broken phrases to the other inhabitants, 
until, from the farthermost nooks and 


56 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


crannies of the world, they flocked to 
see the famous scientist. 

Tubo was almost crushed under the 
clambering throngs of his well-wishers. 
Like true sightseers they remained, re- 
fusing to give way to late, hurrying 
throngs as the news continued to spread. 
They gulped the thin streams of red 
fluid dry; they burrowed into the soft 
red walls and ate and ate and ate to 
repletion; they paused only to split in 
a hundred different ways and to thrust 
their new-born offspring upon the 
spongy food of the caverns. The din 
was frightful; the crush unendurable. 
And all the while the pallid outlaws 
hung to a single spot, burrowing deeper 
and deeper with a certain terrible 
ferocity. 

A clamor arose suddenly within the 
outer pressing ranks—a sound com- 
pacted of terror. Tubo, half-crushed, 
dazed under the weight of his well- 
wishers, knew that sound for what it 
was. A cold anger burned through him. 
Fools! Heedless, stupid fools, all of 


them! Their silly clamor and crowding 
and jostling had brought the avenging 
monsters of the planet upon them. 
Already he could hear the peculiar, 
horrible slimy sound with which they 


engulfed their prey. Already the 
screams of the victims smote his quiver- 
ing form, sent panic waves through the 
close-pressing hordes of his fellows. 
They surged blindly in all directions, 
seeking safety in tiny nooks and cran- 
nies. 

Far off, bearing down upon them with 
steamy exhalations, was a flooding river. 
It was hot ; hot with the forced tempera- 
ture of the distant, interior fires. And 
on its flowing crest, rearing themselves 
avidly in glaring expectation, were myri- 
ads of white oval monsters. So many 
were they that the normal red-colored 
river was a pasty white—almost like 
Spira and his kind. 

There was not a moment to be lost. 
Scattered as they were, the frightened 


multitude was an easy prey. The appe- 
tite of the white beasts was insatiable. 
They would hunt and harry and gobble 
until only the most securely hidden 
would escape. The unnatural warmth 
of the river that carried them in its 
bosom lent them added ferocity, while 
it weakened the delicate protoplasmic 
tissues of their victims. 


IN A FLASH Tubo saw the answer 
to the problems that had been puzzling 
him, on which he had worked unavail- 
ingly before his former world had ex- 
pired. But first there were other more 
immediate and pressing things to be 
done. His very life was at stake. - 

His long, slender form vibrated rap- 
idly. The clear call of his kind rippled 
outward in a widening wave, impinged 
on the receptive protoplasm of his fel- 
lows. 

“Stop where you are!” he shouted. 
“In flight there is death for all of us. 
We outnumber the enemy a hundred to 
one. Safety lies only in swift attack. 
Forward!” 

The panicky hordes stopped irreso- 
lutely, wavered, then caught the con- 
tagion of his voice. A brave reckless- 
ness invaded their beings, filled them 
with strange new, satisfying ardors. 
Formerly they had always fled from the 
dread, engulfing monsters, trusting to 
the multiplying rapidity of their repro- 
duction for the continuance of the spe- 
cies, but never had they dared to stand 
and fight. But now they had found a 
leader, and it was good. 

The multitudes stopped, formed in 
close, solid ranks. Only the outlaw, pal- 
lid corkscrews, led by Spira, remained 
apart. They burrowed more and more 
rapidly, until they were completely in- 
closed and out of the noise of battle. 

The white-dotted flood roared down 
upon the tribes. The white beasts 
reared themselves joyously and fell with 
slobbering, sucking sounds upon the 
massed ranks. Here was food in abun- 


INTRA-PLANETARY 57 


dance, such as they had never seen be- 
fore. Fear was not in their bodies; 
they had no organs for such neuroses. 

But Tubo was already threading the 
phalanxes of the tribes with strong, 
whipping movements. “Forward!” he 
shouted and swam boldly into the 
swarming flood. Behind him grew a 
mighty yell, as the tribes, inflamed by 
the sight of their leader, hurled them- 
selves after him. 

The battle was on! 


The enemy reared and swept into 
their slimy folds thousands of the strug- 
gling tribesmen. Screaming beings 
struggled hopelessly inside their fear- 
some maws and dissolved into fluid ex- 
tinction before the horrified gaze of 
their fellows. The slaughter was ter- 
rific! 

For a moment the ranks wavered. 
There was no fighting these terrible 
creatures. Then Tubo’s voice rose 
strong and clear again. “Smother them 
with your numbers! It is your only 
chance !” 


With a savage roar-of vibrations they 
smashed forward. A hundred clung to 
each thrashing beast. Five, ten, fifteen, 
were swept with hideous screamings into 
the fatal bodies, but others took their 
places. The white monsters twisted and 
writhed and engulfed with sucking 
movements. But the tribesmen clung to 
their enemies with the tenacity of 
leeches. Slower and slower grew the 
thrashings, the convulsive jerkings, un- 
til, with a final shudder, the dread things 
lay limp and silent underneath their 
swarming weight. 

The terrible planetary monsters had 
been defeated. For the first time in the 
history of the universe they had suc- 
cumbed to a direct onslaught. The few 
remaining of the horde broke ranks, and 
swam hastily back against the untainted 
tedness of the underground river, seek- 
ing their lairs in the caverns of the 
chalk-white cliffs, to lick their wounds 


and gain recruits from the ever-spawn- 
ing rock. 

The tribes went wild with joy. Un- 
counted thousands had died in the tre- 
mendous conflict. But that did not mat- 
ter. The dead were dead, and those 
alive could now split and split to their 
heart’s content, bearing innumerable 
progeny into this habitation that was 
now almost miraculously freed of the 
lurking menace. In an _ unbelievably 
short time they would swarm in such 
reckless profusion as no planet had ever 
witnessed before. 

But Tubo was not exulting. A 
frowning quiver passed over his naked 
being. Strepton, pulsing rapidly with 
the strain of his recent exertions, and 
the near approach of a new parturition, 
asked anxiously: “Have you been hurt, 
Tubo?” 

The scientist wriggled a negative. “It 
is not that. But have you felt, Strep- 
ton, how cold it is becoming?” 

Strepton shivered suddenly. “B-rrr! 
Yes! I hadn’t noticed it before. It 
was so hot only a moment ago.” 

“Exactly. The interior fires have 
cooled. The white monsters stirred 
them to fever heat to overcome us. 
When that failed, the fires somehow 
quenched. Strepton,” he went on im- 
pressively, “our planet is dying.” 

The little round fellow rolled over 
with fright. “Impossible!” he wailed. 
“T just got here. I couldn’t make an- 
other space journey now. I’d die. I’d 
be——” 


BUT Tubo was not listening to his 
complaints. He was thinking, thinking 
as hard and as fast as he had ever done 
in all his life. He, too, would not so 
soon be able to withstand the perils and 
strains of the inimical universe outside. 
It was definitely colder now. 

The joyous multitudes had felt it, 
too. Binary fissions remained unfin- 
ished, as life processes slowed. The 
delicate protoplasm af their bodies quiv- 


58 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


ered and jelled. Motility became a diffi- 
cult, painful process. Anguish quivered 
on all their straining forms. Even the 
most stupid knew that the planet had 
abruptly slowed its forward motion, that 
somehow it had become motionless, qui- 
escent, fixed in space. The planet was 
dying, and they 

Tubo saw everything. The red 
sponginess of the caverns, ordinarily a 
strong, regular expansion and contrac- 
tion, subject to definite, calculable laws, 
now fluttered irregularly. The vibra- 
tions were slowing, becoming feebler. 
The red dew on which they fed was a 
trickle where it had been a flood, and a 
new stream burst out of the walls— 
thick, viscid, yellow, slimy. A poison- 
ous exudation whose appearance was a 
ghastly horror. 

The scientist wriggled sharply. “I 
have it, Strepton,” he cried in high ex- 
citement. 

“What ?” asked his friend stupidly. 

“The solution to our troubles. We've 
been fools all our lives—all the lives of 
the uncounted generations before us. 
We are greedy. A world, the universe 
itself, was a thing to be exploited as 
rapidly as possible, to be sucked dry of 
all its natural resources. We had ene- 
mies, it is true—the fierce white mon- 
sters. They ate us and gobbled us and 
held us down. We had only one weapon 
against them, that is, up till now. Our 
fecundity ! 

“We overwhelmed them by sheer pro- 
creation. If we split into new person- 
alities faster than they could seek us out 
and destroy us, we exulted. We had 
been victorious. Blind fools that we 
were! Thereby we destroyed ourselves. 
Strepton, the white monsters were not 
our enemies; they were our best 
friends!” 

The translucence of Strepton’s round- 
ness clouded. “Have you gone mad?” 
he exclaimed angrily. “If the others 
should hear you-——” 


“They shall!” Tubo cried. His sur- 
face was luminous with rapid thought. 
“I’ve found the secret. Listen, all of 
you,” he raised his voice. 

The moaning died. The tight-packed 
multitudes, stiff with approaching dis- 
solution, looked fearfully toward the 
rodlike scientist. 

Tubo was their leader. He had de- 
feated the unconquerable planetary 
beasts. Perhaps he could do something 
now. It was terribly cold. The hot in- 
mer core of the world seemed to have 
quenched. The slow pulsations of the 
cavern walls were the merest quiver 
now. They were trapped in an expir- 
ing world. 

“T have discovered the secret,” Tubo 
shouted, “the scientific secret of the uni- 
verse. It is balance! Our fortunes, 
our very lives, are inextricably bound 
up with the planets we inhabit. As long 
as we are sensible and moderate, the 
worlds of space maintain their inner 
fires, the red rivers flow with nutriment, 
the cavern walls provide us food and 
comfortable shelter. But once we be- 
come greedy and tear recklessly at the 
profusion of their natural resources, 
once we blindly and without thought 
spawn innumerable progeny, what hap- 
pens? The planets cool, they expire, 
and we in our folly with them.” 

He paused, and looked over the stilled, 
breathless multitudes. “TI hesitate to say 
this—it is only an analogy, you under- 
stand—but it is almost as though the 
senseless worlds of the universe, with 
their volcanic inner fires and regular 
eruptions, their caverns and swift flow- 
ing rivers, have a strange, formless, 
mineral life of their own. They can 
bear so much of us and no more. Crowd 
them to recklessness and they die of our 
profusion, even as we . 

A snicker interrupted him. As one 
the taut tribesmen turned to the sound 
of the scoffer. It was Spira, thrusting 
his pallid corkscrew shape out of the 


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INTRA-PLANETARY 59 


wall in which he had been comfortably 
embedded. 

“Ho! Ho!” he snorted. “A philoso- 
pher, a spinner of moonshine. The next 
thing he’ll be telling us that we’re just 
parasites on the bodies of these mythical 
planet creatures of his—that their life 
is more important to the universe than 
ours.” 

“You shut up, Spira,” Tubo cried, 
outraged, “and don’t put your own sacri- 
legious thoughts in my mouth.” He 
reared his rodlike body proudly. 

“We tribesmen are the ultimate crea- 
tions of the universe. We are the own- 
ers and inheritors thereof. The planets 
were formed by an all-wise Being for 
our maintenance and enjoyment. We 
possess the power of thought; we are 
the finest flower of existence. It is 
silly to think that evolution could have 
produced anything superior to us. 

“TI told you it was merely a tentative 
analogy; that the planets might—ab- 
stractly, you understand—possess a 


modicum of queer mineral existence of 


their own. But our time is getting 
short; it is getting colder and colder. 
Just now we have upset the balance of 
things, more definitely than ever before. 
We defeated the white beasts. We have 
crowded and spawned in tremendous 
profusion. As a result the planet has 
become a dying world.” 

“What’s the answer then?” Strep- 
ton queried. 

Tubo took a deep breath. “This! 
An end to our reckless, wasteful meth- 
ods. An end to the rapid destruction 
of natural resources. A reéstablishment 
of certain checks and balances which 
we destroyed by defeating the planetary 
monsters. They evidently had their 
niche in the scheme of things. They 
seemed our most deadly enemies; they 
killed, it is true, individuals of us, but 
by keeping our numbers in bounds they 
unwittingly maintained the delicate bal- 
ance of nature, and in the larger sense, 
were our benefactors.” 


A LOW GROWL went up from his 
auditors. From time immemorial they 
had known the terrible beasts as the 
ogres of their existence, and now this 
Tubo came along and hailed them as 
brothers. It was ridiculous; more, it 
was 

“TI suppose,” squeaked Spira sarcasti- 
cally, “we'll send our new friends a let- 
ter of invitation to come and munch on 
us. And apologies, too, for having 
dared assault their mightinesses.” 

Tubo checked the rising ripple of 
laughter with a blaze of quivering lumi- 
nescence. “You won’t have to apolo- 
gize, Spira,” he said pointedly. “While 
the other tribes were fighting and dy- 
ing, you and your cowardly kind were 
safe ensconced in your hide-out.” The 
pallid one wilted under the roar of ac- 
quiescence. With scared celerity, he 
burrowed back into the walls. 

The scientist went on. “We must 
act, and at once. It may be too late 
even now. Don’t worry about the 
planetary monsters. They fit somehow 
into the scheme of things, and we must 
let them live unharmed. But I don’t 
intend permitting them to prey on us as 
of old. In the laboratory on my former 
world I evolved a defense against their 
depredations—a fluid which I can manu- 
facture in huge quantities from the min- 
erals of this planet. We'll pour it into 
the rivers and thus spread it to every 
corner of the world. It does not kill 
the beasts, but it renders them harm- 
less; deprives them of their strength.” 

“But if you remove what you have 
called a salutary check upon us’’—Strep- 
ton wrinkled his roundness in expostu- 
lation—"‘it will only make things worse.” 

“Not at all,’ Tubo answered calmly. 
“TI am proposing a planned economy, a 
conservation of our natural resources, 
an expert balancing of forces—birth 
control, a new deal!” 

“A new deal!” The phrase whispered 
from one to the other, grew from a 
whisper to a murmur, from a murmur 


60 


to a torrential roar. It had such a satis- 
fying, mouth-filling sound; it meant all 
things to all tribesmen; it held a con- 
tent of vague, large promises that were 
difficult to pin down, and therefore all 
the more glamorous. Besides, the cold 
was creeping into their very vitals. The 
world was definitely dying, and only a 
fortunate few of all their number would 
be able to escape into the soul-searing 
reaches of outer space. Fewer still 
would find a new world in time. They 
had nothing to lose. 

So it was that with hardly a dissent- 
ing vote the plan was adopted and Tubo 
acclaimed as the first dictator and co- 
ordinator. Spira and his brethren re- 
mained cannily out of sigiit. 

Tubo organized things at once. Time 
was precious. He appointed Strepton 
his lieutenant. The tribes were counted 
and separated into companies. Each 
was given a definite task. The cold was 
creeping up on them, slowing their 
movements, freezing their delicate bod- 
ies. The planet had been fixed in one 
spot in space for an unconscionably 
long time. The volcanic explosions 
were barely perceptible. 

But only to Strepton would Tubo con- 
fide his fears. To the others he was a 
driving dynamo of energy, a fount of 
radiating enthusiasm. He infected them 
with his vigor. In double-quick time a 
laboratory was set up, and a corps of 
willing, though inexpert assistants 
placed at his disposal. The chemical 
fluid was soon being manufactured in 
large quantities, and dumped into the 
languidly flowing rivers. 

The next step was to put a stop to 
all procreation for a fixed period of 
time. Tubo worked feverishly at the 
problem. Finally it was solved. He 
found that the involuntary urge to 
binary fission was a function of the 
saline content of the rivers and of the 
amount of food ingested per unit of 
time. 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


The second half of the problem was 
easily attended to. Food was rationed 
out in scientifically calculated portions. 
But the first was not so easy. It was 
only after herculean labors that Tubo 
evolved an -apparatus which extracted 
the reproduction-accelerating salt from 
the mighty rivers in sufficient quantities. 

Then there was the task of getting 
rid of the glittering stores of crystals. 
Tubo finally solved this seemingly in- 
superable problem by eliminating them 
through the numerous fissures and tiny 
tunnels that led to the outer surface 
of the planet. There it was left in 
huge, caked mountains. 

The third step was to scatter the 
tribes to assigned habitations in the 
planet. Tubo had noted that whenever 
they swarmed in huge throngs as they 
did now, it played havoc with the secret 
internal economy of the world. Ac- 
cordingly he had scouts map the entire 
interior of the world, bring him careful 
estimates of resources, mineral deposits. 
growths of food, navigable waterways, 
climate, ease of communication, etc. 

Then, with this data on hand, and a 
knowledge of the peculiar requirements 
of each tribe and its characteristics, he 
was able to assign it to a suitable ter- 
ritory. Here he ran into difficulties. 
For individual equations were involved. 
There were murmurs of autocracy, pro- 
tests against particular assignments, 
cries of favoritism. 

But Tubo crackled out his orders, un- 
bending, harsh with strain. In the end 
he won. For the cold was a bitter ally. 
Already some of the weaker and more 
delicately nurtured had succumbed. 
Blind obedience was their last chance of 
survival. 


THEN Tubo called for volunteers 
from these tribes who could at will pro- 
duce membranous space suits. Volun- 
teers to wriggle their way to the surface 
of the dying planet, to cast themselves 


ae 


ye  -—— * e*F 465 Ole sleet lCUUlUCSCCO 


™inoewnq 


into the destructive radiations of outer 
space, and attempt their tortuous way 
to the other worlds of the system. 

“But why?” Strepton, his lieutenant 
asked, puzzled. 

“So that my work may not die,” Tubo 
answered, exalted. “It is a question 
whether it is not too late to save our 
own world. The space volunteers will 
bring the tidings of my plan, of the 
technique I have evolved, to all the uni- 
verse. They must organize even as we 
have fumblingly done, with more of 
leisure, with improved equipment. The 
new deal must go on, even though we 
as individuals die. The universe must 
be made into a safe, secure place for 
our people, with every world an ordered, 
flourishing economy, where chance and 
sudden death shall have been totally 
eliminated.” 

Strepton stared at him with awed ad- 
miration. It was a dazzling vision. 
“But why,” he asked hesitatingly, “don’t 
you go yourself? You have the space 
suit you invented. The chances here 
of survival, you admit, are slim. Why 
not escape while you have the chance?” 

Tubo turned away. “My place is 
with my people,” he said abruptly. 

The volunteers were finally trained, 
sent on their hazardous missions. Oth- 
ers went, too, pallid with fear, forced 
out by numerous assisting shoves— 
Spira and his wretched tribe of outlaws. 

Strepton shook his head. “They'll 
make trouble,” he warned sagely. “You 
should have kept them here under your 
eye.” 

But Tubo smiled secretly and said 
nothing. He knew that Spira’s tribe 
could not survive the inimical radiations 
of space. They shifted from world to 
world only on chance, occasional colli- 
sions betweén the planets. Tubo was 
not a sentimentalist, you see. 

Now came a fearful period. The cold 
seemed to be getting more bitter, the 
streams grew more and more sluggish. 


INTRA-PLANETARY 


61 


The tribesmen were dying in increasing 
numbers. The living could hardly crawl 
about their business. Tubo shut him- 
self up in his laboratory, and gave way 
to despair. Had all his efforts been in 
vain? There was nothing else he could 
do. 

Once Strepton crept slowly in to re- 
port a strange phenomenon. The 
barely moving red rivers had suddenly 
overflowed their banks—an inundation. 
“But the strangest thing of all,” he re- 
ported in a queer, excited voice, “is the 
character of the new flood. It’s a color- 
less liquid, and it’s full of dead bodies. 
The dead bodies of our people! It’s 
all over with us.” 

Tubo galvanized into action. He 
lashed out of the laboratory, stood on 
the banks of the torrential flood. Strep- 
ton had told the truth. Each wave cast 
up at his feet its bloated, sinister cargo. 
Rodlike people of his own tribe, round 
fellows like Strepton, thousands on 
thousands of them. 

Strepton said in a hushed, miserable 
voice. “The world is dead. These are 
our people from the outlying districts.” 

Tubo bent over, examined them 
closely. When he straightened, there 
was a strained look on him. “They are 
not our people,” he stated positively. 
“These are strangers from other plan- 
ets, and they’ve been dead a long time.” 

“But how ”” commenced Strepton, 
gasping. 

“T don’t know,” Tubo cut him short. 
It was unbelievable, yet there was the 
evidence. The dead beings continued to 
wash through the subterranean channels. 
The tribesmen watched them with super- 
Stitious, fearful eyes. It was a judg- 
ment of the Almighty upon them, they 
whispered, for having hearkened to the 
blasphemous proposals of Tubo. He 
was flying in the face of nature, of 
things-as-they-are and always-would-be. 
This was the retribution. 


But Tubo locked himself up in his 


62 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


laboratory and did not listen. This 
weird irruption was at present insoluble, 
yet he believed that it was in accordance 
with definite natural laws. Later, if 
things worked out, he would apply him- 
self to the problem. If they didn’t— 
he shrugged all over—it wouldn’t mat- 
ter either way. 

The cold seemed now at a standstill. 
The rivers barely flowed. The inunda- 
tion had subsided. The dead bodies 
were begining to stink. The walls to 
which his laboratory was attached hardly 
vibrated. It took delicate instruments 
to discern the rate of expansion and con- 
traction. His viscous, motile jelly was 
hardening. Death was not far off. 


Then, with hopelessness creeping over 
him, he turned a lackluster form to his 
instruments. He quivered. Was it but 
the Mlusion of approaching death? The 
temperature filament. It showed a rise! 
A slight rise, it is true, but a definite, 
perceptible up-grade, nevertheless. Life 
surged through him again. Feverishly 
he examined his other instruments. The 
liquid-flow cilia. An increase in speed. 
The pressure bellows. The walls were 
heaving at a more regular rate, and with 
greater force. 

Tubo flung himself outside. He 
shouted in stentorian tones. The col- 
ony of his cavern remained moveless, 
dulled in apathy. Then, as the purport 
of his exultant message penetrated their 
half-dead beings, they squirmed toward 
him, lifted themselves eagerly. 

What was that? The dying planet 
was functioning again? Was it possi- 
ble? Had Tubo really won through? 
Something rumbled and rolled echoing 
through all the caverns and subterranean 
rivers. A belch of hot, eruptive gases. 
The planet quivered; it moved. Once 
more it turned and heaved in space, 
after long quiescence. 

A shout sprang from the multitude, 
was repeated and reéchoed in a wide, 
expanding wave until not a colony in 


the remotest parts of the world but knew 
the glad news. 

They were saved! And Tubo was 
their savior! Tubo, mightiest scientist 
since the universe began! Tubo, im- 
mortal dictator to a grateful people! 


DR. TRUESDALE closed the door 
softly and carefully behind him, then 
capered and whooped. 

“Tt’s worked, Patterson, it’s worked!” 
He was skinny and bald, and his eyes 
glittered behind thick lenses. 

Eric Patterson, bacteriologist in the 
Madison Hospital, lifted his eyes from 
the microscope through which he was 
peering. “Eh, what’s that?” he mut- 
tered vaguely. “What worked?” 

“The serum, you fool!” Dr. Trues- 
dale exploded. He skipped about like 
an elderly faun, “I’m rich; I’m famous 
now! The universal serum—Trues- 
dale’s serum—for all diseases. One in- 
jection and 33 


“Tone down a bit,” Patterson advised. 


“And tell me what happened to give you 
delusions of grandeur.” 


Truesdale sputtered: “Why, you in- 


solent young puppy, you ” Then he 
laughed. “Come and see for yourself. 
You know the case in Room 13?” 

Patterson nodded. “Sure,” he said 
bitterly. “I’ve just finished looking at 
a specimen of his blood. He’s got the 
bugs of everything but the bubonic 
plague in his system. Swarms of tu- 
bercle bacilli, streptococci galore, and a 
lovely little colony of treponema pallida, 
the spirochetes of syphilis. It’s a won- 
der he’s lived this long, even in a coma. 
He should be dead by now.” 

“Dead nothing, you idiot!’ Truesdale 
shouted. “He’s alive, and not only 
alive and turning in his bed, but actu- 
ally asking for food!” 

“What’s that?” Patterson asked 
sharply. “You told me half an hour ago 
his temperature had fallen from 106 to 


INTRA-PLANETARY 63 


95 within minutes ; that his heart barely 
fluttered. No man has ever come out 
of that alive.” 

“Well, this man has,” Truesdale re- 
torted. “You fellows in the hospital 
laughed at my serum, wouldn’t give it a 
chance. Well, I’ve showed you. He 
was as good as dead, anyway, so I 
sneaked him a dose while the chief was 
out. For an hour it was touch and go. 
Then he snapped out of it. Look at 
him.” 

Patterson looked. There was no ques- 
tion about it. The patient who by all 
the rules of medicine should have been 
ready for the slab was peevishly twist- 
ing his scrawny frame and babbling 
about steaks and he-man’s food. 

“Take a sample of his blood now,” 
the doctor crowed. 

Once more in the privacy of the 
laboratory, Patterson bent over his 
slides. When he arose, there was a 
queer look in his eyes. 

“Truesdale,” he said shakily, “I don’t 
understand it. I’ve got scads of bugs 


under there as lively and active as you 


please. Every pathogenic variety you 
could think of. No,” he interrupted him- 
self, “there is one missing. The trepon- 
ema pallida have disappeared, been wiped 
out. How in Hades that chap in there 
is not only alive, but with all the symp- 
toms of recovery, beats me.” 

Truesdale was taken aback, but only 
momentarily. “What’s the difference 
what bugs he’s got in his system?” he 
chuckled. ‘“He’s cured, isn’t he?” 

And the patient was cured. A con- 
ference of grave and reverend doctors 
pronounced him as such; the man him- 
self was positive of it. Yet his blood 
still swarmed with pathogenic bacteria. 

Because it could do no harm, Trues- 
dale’s serum was tried on others in the 
hospital. A few cases unaccountably 
died, but the vast majority within a day 
showed unmistakable improvement. 
“Cause and effect,” muttered Patterson 
skeptically. 


But he kept his thoughts to himself. 
Even when it was noted that the geo- 
graphical factor had a great deal to do 
with the efficacy of the serum. Only as 
it was given in slowly widening circles 
from the hospital did it work. And 
there were remarkable cures in individu- 
als within the circles, individuals to 
whom the serum had not been adminis- 
tered. As if, Patterson thought, some 
influence were slowly radiating from the 
hospital, in ever-widening circles, evolv- 
ing immunity to all diseases. 

But, in the eyes of the world, and 
of most of the medical profession, 
Truesdale’s serum was responsible. He 
became rich, famous, on the pinnacle of 
glory, almost overnight, while Patterson 
puzzled over his messy slides, his micro- 
scopes. The bugs were all there, in 
every specimen, yet somehow they had 
lost their capacity for harm. 

He noted, too, the slight drop in blood 
salinity, the little deposits of free salt 
that evaporated on the skins of the re- 
covering patients. And he also noted 
that the blood temperature of the human 
body had increased to a norm of 998 
degrees. As though the entire human 
race had become slightly sick, slightly 
feverish, and thereby obtained an im- 
munity against the further ravages of 
disease. 

But there were no qualms, no misgiv- 
ings, on the part of Truesdale and his 
henchmen. The serum was the cure-all ; 
and he was the greatest benefactor the 
world had ever known. In the course 
of years, every one was inoculated with 
the serum, and gradually, sometimes 
after the use of the serum, sometimes in 
advance of it, the immunity spread over 
the earth. Every one was a little fever- 
ish, but no one died of disease. And 
the name of Doctor Truesdale went 
rocketing down the centuries, long after 
Patterson and his little doubts were 
dead and forgotten. 

Even as the name of Tubo resounded 
in another and different universe. 


I AM NOT GOD 


Beginning a gripping two-part 
story of catastrophe and science 


by Nat Schachner 


Deborah! She was trying to prevent him from loosening his helmet, 
while all around him humanity was succumbing to the nebular gas. 


T= FIRST appearance of the 
nebula was unexciting enough. 
It was small and inconspicuous, 
and but one of a dozen faint blotches 
of deposited silver on the exposed 
photographic plate of the new two-hun- 
dred-inch telescope. The astronomer in 
tharge of the observatory checked the 
plate against the older ones in his pos- 


AST—5 


session, and found that this was a new 
nebula. But so were several others in 
that particular area—which was under- 
standable enough, considering the in- 
creased light-gathering power of the re- 
cently installed instrument. 

He therefore duly noted its position, 
jotted down that it was of the order of 
the twenty-fifth magnitude, gave it a 


66 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


catalogue number, G 113, and filed the 
plate away for further routine study. 
The discovery did not rate a line in the 
world’s newspapers. But the scanty 
data appeared, in consort with other 
anonymous numbers, in the next issue 
of the Astrophysical Journal, a month 
and a half later. 

It was there that Stephen Dodd first 
came across it. Ordinarily it would 
have meant very little to him also. But 
it happened that he was just then in the 
throes of a highly upsetting bit of re- 
search, and there was not a nebula in the 
entire universe, big, small or medium- 
sized, remote or near, in which he was 
not feverishly interested. 

For the thousandth time his eyes clung 
to the tightly sealed flask that nestled 
with careful caution in its supporting 
cradle. Within it a greenish gas glim- 
mered weirdly in the overhead illumina- 
tion of the laboratory. For the thou- 
sandth time his eyes strayed, almost un- 
willingly, yet with fearful fascination, to 
the motionless, strangely stiff little body 
of the white mouse that lay unhearing, 
unseeing, within the oxygen chamber. 

Steve Dodd shook his head savagely. 
Damn it! If only the mouse were dead, 
it would be understandable, normal. 
The green gas he had toiled over would 
then have been but another poison gas, 
lethal enough in all conscience—a deadly 
weapon to add to the arsenal of already 
over-sufficiently equipped nations—but 
nothing that did not fit into the estab- 
lished properties of familiar gases. 

But that mouse lying there, still, mo- 
tionless, was terrifying. For a month, 
ever since he had tried a minute spray 
of the new gas on its outer skin, it had 
not moved. Its heart had stopped beat- 
ing, the most delicate tests betrayed no 
sign of breathing, of the normal proc- 
esses of metabolism that continue with- 
out pause in a living body. 

Yet the mouse was not dead. ‘ts 
blood, skillfully withdrawn in hypoc r- 
mic specimens, remained unclotted and 


fresh and bright-red in appearance. The 
organs showed no evidences of degen- 
eration; the bacterial decay and loath- 
some putrescence that begin almost im- 
mediately on death were conspicuously 
absent. And, worst of all, its eyes, 
bright and beady in life, were still bright 
and beady and unfilmed. They seemed 
to follow Dodd with mute and hopeless 
pathos, as if imploring him to remove 
the weird catalepsy that had clogged its 
limbs. 

Steve Dodd shook his head impa- 
tiently, in unconscious answer to that 
mute appeal. He had tried his best to 
bring life back to those tiny limbs with 
every device that modern science and 
medicine held available. Baths of pure 
oxygen, intravenous injections of digi- 
talis, strychnine and adrenalin, electrical 
massage and short-wave treatments. 
Everything that his friend, Dr. George 
Cunningham, sworn to secrecy, could 
suggest. 

But the mouse lay in its cataleptic 
trance, unmoving, unstirring, shriveling 
daily, wasting away to a thing of skele- 
ton bones and loose, wrinkling skin, 
queerly alive, yet soon to die irretriev- 
ably. 

Steve shivered, though the night was 
warm, and his glance went back to that 
strange, semi-luminescent green gas in 
the specially leaded glass container. 
That was another property about it 
which made it even more of a menace. 
Its remarkable penetrating powers! 
Ordinary glass was like a sieve to it, so 
were wood and stone and most of the 
metals. 

Its first production had almost sent 
him, Stephen Dodd, into the place of 
the mouse. It was only the accidental 
intervention of a lead screen used in 
conjunction with his X-ray work that 
saved him. So the glass he now used 
was leaded, and he wore a special suit 
and helmet of fabric heavily impreg- 
nated with lead salts when he worked 
with the gas. 


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Oe ee ee ol ee 


I AM NOT GOD 67 


STEPHEN. DODD was a chemist, 
and a very good one. He was interna- 
tionally known for his work on the rare 
gases, and his laboratory was gener- 
ously endowed by the Lauterbach Foun- 
dation. Yet he was not quite thirty, 
and possessed of decided views on a 

many matters only remotely con- 
nected with the science to which he had 
devoted his life. Deborah Gardner, 
daughter of the famous astronomer, 
Samuel Gardner, who headed the ob- 
servatory in the same university town, 
could vouch for that. Perhaps that was 
why, she thought tenderly to herself, 
Steve was the darling he was. 
He had started his researches with the 


_idea of duplicating nebulium—that 


strange, unknown gas which is found in 
most nebulz. Bowen of Pacadena had 
proved in 1927 that the three mysterious 
bright lines in the nebular spectrum— 
whose wave lengths are 5007, 4959 and 
3727 Angstroms respectively—are due 
to multi-ionized oxygen and nitrogen 
under peculiar nebular conditions. But 
no investigator had been able to repro- 
duce the mysterious lines in earth labo- 
ratories. 

Dodd had thrown himself into the 
work with characteristic enthusiasm. 
For a year he had toiled ceaselessly, im- 
mured night after night in his laboratory 
with complicated apparatus and ma- 
chines capable of generating giant elec- 
trical charges. Finally, using a modi- 
fication of a De Graaff electrostatic ma- 
chine, he had been able to superinduce 
multiple ionizations on a mixture of 
oxygen and nitrogen—in other words, 
plain, everyday air. 

But, with success at his very door, the 
thing itself eluded him. For the spec- 
tral lines were slightly displaced. Al- 
lowing for all possible velocity shifts, 
they were still seven Angstroms each to 
the left of the corresponding line in the 
nebular spectra. It was infuriating. He 
had discovered a new type gas, but it 
was not nebulium, the gas he had set out 


to discover. At least, it was not the 
nebulium in any of the nebulze known to 
date. 


THEREFORE he had called on 
Samuel Gardner, his good friend, and 
prospective father-in-law, to assist him 
—though not even to him had he dis- 
closed the terrible properties of the 
pseudonebulium he had evolved. The 
secret of its manufacture must die with 
him ; the very fact of its existence must 
remain undisclosed, unless somewhere 
in the universe it existed naturally. 

Thus it was that Gardner good-na- 
turedly analyzed the spectra of nebula 
after nebula, thinking young Steve a lit- 
tle bit crazy, but to be humored never- 
theless. 


Steve received the reports with a 
queer mixture of disappointment at re- 
peated failures and relief that he would 
not be compelled to disclose what he had 
discovered. For nowhere in the uni- 
verse were the nebulium lines anything 
but normal ; nowhere was there evidence 
of the existence of pseudonebulium 
with its seven Angstrom units shift to 
the left. 


Steve lifted the receiver mechanically, 
heard himself calling the observatory. 
After a decent interval, Gardner’s quiz- 
zical drawl came lazily over the wire. 

“Hello, Steve!” he complained, “this 
is my busy night. If you’ve got any 
more fool nebulz for me, you'll have to 
count me out, J——” 

“Listen, Gardner,” Dodd pleaded, “this 
is the last batch. If you can’t locate 
what I’m after to-night, I won’t bother 
you any more.” He had determined 
to give his scientific sense of fair play 
this final opportunity. To-night, after 
Gardner’s usual report, he would destroy 
the flask with its dreadful contents, kill 
the mouse with weapons that left no 
doubt as to its demise, and forget all 
about it. Dr. Cunningham was close- 
mouthed, and besides, he did not know 


68 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


more than it had been necessary to tell 
him. 

It was characteristic of Dodd not to 
have sought personal aggrandizement 
from the discovery, or to think even 
momentarily of the fabulous sums the 
war departments of the various nations 
of the earth would have paid him for 
the formula. He had very positive ideas 
on the subject of the nations of the 
earth and all their works. Even now, 
the mad race of armaments was nearing 
its inevitable close. The earth re- 
sounded with the rumble of mobiliza- 
tions and the thunderous roar of tanks 
and motorized artillery moving every- 
where up to the frontiers. Ultimatums 
were in the air and dates set for the vast 
explosion. 

“Well,” Gardner chuckled, “this once; 
but mind you a 

“Here they are,’ Dodd interrupted 
hastily. He read off the list from the 
item in the Astrophysical Journal. They 
were mostly fifteenth or twentieth mag- 
nitude nebule. When he came to G 
113 he hesitated. The twenty-fifth mag- 
nitude was a bit faint for Gardner’s 
apparatus. For a moment he was going 
to leave it out—it was such an unim- 
portant speck of gas somewhere in the 
far remotenesses of the universe. The 
fate of the world trembled on his inde- 
cision. Then he read it aloud. 

“Now listen here, my boy,” the as- 
tronomer expostulated patiently. “I 
can’t get that magnitude. You know 
that. I have only a thirty-inch spectro- 
graph, not a two-hundred-inch.” 

“Oh, well,” Dodd responded indiffer- 
ently. “If you can’t locate it, you can’t. 
And remember, my promise holds good. 
This is positively the last batch. If their 
spectra do not disclose the one I’m after, 
I’m through, washed up!” 


II. 


IT WAS some three hours later, 
after 1 a. m., while Steve was dozing in 


his chair, fatigued from work and jum- 
bled emotions, that the persistent ring- 
ing of the phone awoke him. He stared 
around, bewildered a moment, getting 
his bearings. Everything was quiet and 
very peaceful. The noise of the neigh- 
boring city had dulled to a stealthy mur- 
mur, the laboratory enfolded him in its 
illuminated quiescence, the green gas 
glowed steadily in its leaded flask, and 
the mouse was still stretched out, gaunt 
and unmoving, though still alive, in the 
oxygen chamber. 

He shook the black mop of his hair 
out of his eyes, picked up the receiver. 
It was Gardner, his draw] forgotten, his 
voice muffled and queerly excited. 

“Hello, Steve! Just finished the spec- 
troscopic analysis of that list. Here 
they are.” He bit them off rapidly, con- 
cisely, one after the other. Angstrom 
units of the three nebulium lines monot- 
onously identical, as always. Then a 
perceptible pause. “About G 113 now, 
Steve. Sure you gave me the right co- 
ordinates ?” 

“Sure,” Dodd answered _ sleepily. 
“But just a moment, I’ll check it.” He 
flung open the Journal to the right page, 
ran his finger down the list, then read 
aloud. “Right ascension—l1l hour, 9 
minutes ; declination—plus 52.8.” 

“Humph!” Samuel Gardner muttered. 
“That’s exactly what you gave me be- 
fore, but y 

“Couldn’t locate it, eh? Don’t bother 
then. The magnitude is evidentiy too 
low for your instruments.” 

“You're right, Steve. I couldn’t lo 
cate it, but there’s another nebula, close 
enough by to be its twin. Listen to this! 
Right ascension—l hour, 8 minutes; 
declination—plus 51.7.” 

“That’s funny,” Dodd said puzzled. 
“Must be the same one, but it’s the first 
time I’ve known the Peters Observatory 
people to be caught in an error.” 

“That’s not the only error,’”’ Gardner 
pursued, still with that queer tinge of 
excitement in his voice. “The nebula! 


I AM NOT GOD 69 


have is of the order of the sixteenth 
magnitude, not the twenty-fifth.” 

This time Dodd was ihoroughly 
awake. “But that’s impossible,” he pro- 
tested. “A difference of nine magni- 
tudes! Some one must have been drunk 
over there. I’ve a good mind to call 
them up right now and congratulate 
them on their staff. -By heavens, I am. 
So long!” 

“But wait,” Gardner 
haven’t told you——” 

It was too late. Dodd had hung up 
and was already getting long distance. 
‘He was angry. If there was anything 
he prided himself on, it was meticulous 
accuracy, and here was the famous Pe- 
ters Observatory. 

Meanwhile Gardner was jingling the 
hook frantically, trying to get him back. 
But the operator was imperturbable. 
“The line is still busy, sir,” she repeated 
sweetly, albeit a bit wearily, until Gard- 
ner swore and hung up in disgust. “The 
young idiot!” he muttered, and stared 
again with frowning intentness at the 
spectograph that lay before him, with 
its three bright lines plainly showing. 
Then he shrugged his scholarly-stooped 
“shoulders. “Plenty of time in the morn- 
ing to let him know, I suppose.” 

How could he know that every min- 
ute, every second even, was infinitely 
precious; that the continued existence 
of all life on this planet depended on 
those three innocent-seeming bright 
lines ! ' 

“Norman Kittredge?’ Steve flung 
‘finally into the phone. The lengthy 
wait for a connection had brought his 
inexplicable anger to the boiling point. 

A sleepy ‘voice came through faintly. 
“Yes. Who are you?” 

“Stephen Dodd, of East Haven. 
You're the fellow doing the plates for 
‘the new star map?” 

“Dodd? Dodd?” the faint voice 
sounded puzzled. “Oh yes, the chemist. 
‘Sure, what about it?” 

“Well, let me tell you something,” 


shouted, “I 


Steve said carefully. Inwardly he was 
surprised at the irritation he felt. “You 
must have been drunk when you ‘re- 
ported the codrdinates for that new 
nebula, G 113.” 

There was a pregnant silence. Then 
Kittredge said furiously. “Now listen 
here, Dodd! If this is a joke, it’s a 
damn fool thing. I don’t know you per- 
sonally, and I don’t want te——” 

“It’s no joke,” Steve retorted heat- 
edly. “Look at that plate again, and 
check it against the figures in the Astro- 
physical Journal. Being out a degree or 
so in declination and a mere minute in 
right ascension may be not so bad— 
from your point of view; but when an 
astronomer of the Peters Observatory is 
out nine magnitudes, I’m giving him the 
benefit of the doubt when I tell him he 
was drunk.” 

Kittredge’s voice was suddenly icy, 
carefully precise. “I’m going to make 
you eat those words, Dodd. I’m a fool 
for doing this; but I’m getting out that 
plate right now, and by heavens es 

The receiver crashed down on a far- 
away table. Steve waited, his irritated 
anger subsiding. He even grinned at 
himself. Wait until Kittredge got on 
again, meek and full of apologies. 

“Hello!” It was Kittredge. 
still there ?”’ 

“Sure,” Steve chuckled. “What’s the 
story? Mislaid the plate?” 

“No, Dodd,” the astronomer answered 
coldly. “I have it right in front of me, 
and the Journal. If I was drunk then, 
I’m still drunk. The figures couldn't 
be more right. Now let me tell you 
what I think of you, young man.” And 
for fifteen minutes he told him, steadily, 
continuously, -without stopping for 
breath. It was an expert performance, 
and when Steve finally hung up, he was 
ted all around the ears, his temples were 
wet, and his finger nails had dug red 
arcs into’the palms of his hands. 

“Whew!” he said to himself, almost 
admiringly. “That chap must have 


“You 


70 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


driven mules in his time.” Then his 
thoughts swung to his future father-in- 
law. “Damn!” he muttered. “He got 
me into a peck of trouble. Must have 
been his idea of a joke. I'll get him be- 
fore I forget all the neat phrases Kit- 
tredge used.” And up went the phone 
again. 

There was real relief in Gardner’s 
voice. “I’ve been trying to get you, 
Steve——” 

“Sure, it was a great joke, wasn’t it?” 
Dodd interrupted. “Kittredge thought 
so, too. Wait till I tell you what he 
called me——” 

“Joke?” Gardner echoed, astonished. 
“What do you mean?” 

“Don’t pretend. Those figures you 
gave me. The Journal had the right 
ones.” 

“Oh!” Gardner said slowly. Then: 
“Steve, I was not joking. Mine were 
correct, too.” 

“You 
aghast. 


“T mean that within the past month 
and a half the nebula G 113 has moved 
that distance over the face of the heav- 
ens.” 

“Great heavens, man!” Steve ex- 
ploded. “Then it must be right within 
the solar system.” 

“Not quite. You didn’t give me a 
chance to tell you some very important 
things. The spectral lines of G 113 are 
all shifted heavily to the violet. I’ve 
calculated a velocity of fifteen thousand 
miles per second in the line of sight— 
an extra-galactic velocity. That means 
it’s now somewhere within a few trillion 
miles of our system, where no nebula 
has ever been known to be, and coming 
toward us_with fearful speed. I’ll need 
another observation, a month from now, 
to be able to plot its course definitely.” 

Steve forgot his anger. He was im- 
mensely interested. But after all, this 
was more up Gardner’s alley than his 
own. He had forgotten all about the 


mean ” Steve started 


fact that he had not been given the re- 
port on G 113’s spectral lines. 

“There is another thing,” the astrono- 
mer continued. “You didn’t give me 
a chance to tell you. The Angstrom 
units for the three lines. Let me read 
them to you: 500; 4952; 3720.” 

It took Steve a perceptible second to 
grasp what he had heard. Then his 
heart spun like a pinwheel within his 
breast. He could hardly breathe. “You 
don’t know what you’re saying.” His 
voice sounded strangled. “It isn’t so— 
you're playing a joke—it’s——”’ 

“My boy,” the older man answered 
seriously, “the one thing I never jest 
about is my work. This is my life 
work, the air I breathe. Thanks to you 
I’ve discovered the closest nebula in the 
universe to us; with a velocity that is 
almost unbelievable, and showing the 
spectral lines of new elements. But 
how did you know? About the new 
elenients, I mean. You've been mighty 
secretive, Steve, and I’ve humored you. 
But now E 


Il. 


DODD STARED with horrified eyes 
at the little flask with the green gas, at 
the mouse that was alive, yet shriveling 
slowly from day to day, and groaned. 
His scientific integrity demanded now 
that he publish the results of his work, 
no matter what the final outcome. 

“T want you to come over to my labo- 
ratory right now,” Steve said rapidly. 
“Now! At once! And bring all the 
data on G 113 with you. It—it’s im- 
portant as hell!” 

He could hear Gardner taking a deep 
breath at the other end. “All right, my 
boy, if you say so. Be over in half an 
hour.” 

It was a fifteen-minute run by motor, 
but it was almost two-thirty when the 
doorbell rang. That hour’s wait was 
the longest Steve had ever been com- 
pelled to undergo. He paced up and 


I AM NOT GOD 71 


down the laboratory with quick, jerky 
steps, eying mouse and gas with alter- 
nate stabs. He was in a furious tur- 
moil. Scientific integrity, tremendous 
discoveries, nations arming, horribly 
deadly weapon, consequences to hu- 
manity—phrases that spun round and 
round until they were empty of all con- 
tent, of all meaning. 

He: jerked: like a mechanical toy to 
the door when the buzzer sounded, flung 
it open with an impatient gesture. 
“Good heavens, Gardner,’ he cried 
impatiently, “it’s about time——” 

“Don’t bawl dad out,” a fresh young 
voice greeted him. “It wasn’t his fault. 
I dropped in at the observatory just as 
he was leaving, and insisted on coming 
along. It took a bit of time to get rid 
of my friends.” 

Steve stared. “Deborah! What are 
you doing out this time of the night?” 

“Emulating my elderly parent and the 
man who thinks he’s going to be my 
husband,” she retorted. “There was a 
party over at Jean’s, and you were here, 
so 1 went on my own.” 

She was. slim and petite, and the 
laughter glinted always in her eyes. 
Steve felt the tired lines around his 
mouth relax at the sight of her. ‘‘All 
right,” he yielded a bit ungraciously. 
“If you’re here, you’re here. Though I 
would have preferred——” 

The tall, slightly stooped, quizzical 
figure of Samuel Gardner followed his 
daughter in. Under his arm he held a 
leather portfolio. 

“T told her the same thing, Steve,” he 
groaned. “But you ought to know by 
this time——” 

“He does,” Deborah retorted. Her 
eyes roamed alertly around the labora- 
tory, came to a dead stop on the glass 
tank in which the mouse lay silently. 
“This early morning conversation have 
anything to do with that little dead ani- 
mal ?” 


“Plenty,” Steve said in quiet despera- 


tion. “And he’s not dead. Let me see 
those plates, please, and your data.” 

Gardner opened his portfolio without 
a word, spread them on the table, Steve 
studied the spectral lines against the 
standard comparison plate, checked 
rapidly through the calculations in 
deathly silence. Deborah sensed from 
the strained attitudes of the men that 
she had inadvertently muddled into 
something important, and she was level- 
headed enough to make herself as un- 
obtrusive as possible. 

Steve finally raised his head. “It 
checks,” he said wearily. Gardner 
stared at him. There should have been 
exultation, the thrill of some startling 
new discovery in his voice; instead, 
there was something akin to despair. 

“If you wish to tell us,” he started 
very quietly 

“Of course. I need your advice. Lis- 
ten!” And for half an hour they lis- 
tened while Steve poured out the story ; 
father and daughter, engrossed, not see- 
ing even the slow-shading dawn light 
over the quiet street outside. 

“So you see,” he concluded finally, 
“the dilemma I’m in. It isn’t a question 
of fame and glory with me, heaven 
knows. I’ve synthesized a new air, a 
multi-ionized mixture of oxygen and 
nitrogen, and it’s what I’ve called 
pseudonebulium. And lo and behold! 
Along comes a nebula, composed of that 
same deadly atmosphere, the only one 
of its kind in the universe. Scientists 
will want to know about those three 
lines, a shade of ionization under that of 
true nebulium. I hold the secret. What 
shall I do?” 

“T say destroy it,” Deborah answered 
promptly. Her eyes were wide on that 
motionless mouse. “Civilization is at a 
low enough ebb as it is. The world is 
preparing for a new era of slaughter. 
Put this new weapon in the hands of 
unprincipled men, and they will destroy 
humanity. You yourself say only lead 
will resist its penetrating powers. There 


72 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


isn’t enough of the metal in existence to 
protect all humanity. Think, Steve, of 
millions of men, women and children, 
lying in a coma like that poor beast, 
shriveling away slowly, while nothing 
can be done to save them. A living 
death, far worse than actual annihila- 
tion.” 

Steve’s eyes were grim. “You're 
right, Deborah,” he said slowly. He 
moved quickly toward the fatal flask. 

“Just a moment,” Gardner’s voice 
rang out. Steve swung around in sur- 
prise. Deborah cried desperately: “Fa- 
ther, don’t let your scientific ardor run 
away with you. Don’t you see what this 
particular discovery means?” 

“T see everything, only too well. But 
Steve mustn't destroy that flask of gas, 
or the mouse. They both are infinitely 
valuable.” 

“Why ?” 

“I did not tell you, Steve,’ 


’ 


the as- 


tronomer said heavily, “because the data 
is still too fragmentary for accuracy. 


But now, under the circumstances, I 
must. At the terrific speed G 113 is 
traveling, its path through space may be 
considered for its relatively short dis- 
tance from us as a straight line. From 
the two observations we already have, it 
looks very much as if’—he paused and 
took a deep breath—“‘as if it might pass 
very close. to the solar system. But,” 
he added hastily, “I’d need another ob- 
servation, at least a month from now, to 
trace its course with real accuracy.” 

Deborah said, “Oh,” very faintly. 
Lines etched themselves around Steve’s 
eyes. He nodded, as if certain inchoate 
fears had been confirmed for him. “By 
close you mean of course a direct hit 
on our system,” he said evenly. 

“T didn’t say that,” Gardner answered 
quickly. 

“You didn’t have to.” Again there 
was a deathly silence in the laboratory. 
The quiet dawn filtered slowly through 
the window, but no one noticed it. 

It was Deborah who finally broke the 


unbearable weight of their thoughts. 

“But father,” she protested, “isn’t it 
true that the earth has passed more than 
once right through cometary tails? | 
remember reading that in 1910 we were 
literally enveloped by Halley’s comet.” 

Gardner lifted his head hopefully. 
“That’s true,” he murmured excitedly. 
“T had forgotten.” 

“And cyanogen is definitely known 
to exist in the spectra of comets,” she 
continued quickly. “You wouldn't 
want a more deadly gas than that. Yet 
no one in the world died, or suffered the 
least inconvenience. Now comets’ tails 
are rare enough—I understand that they 
are thousands of times less dense than 
our atmosphere at sea level, but I’ve also 
read that the density of the average 
nebula is considerably less even than 
that. It runs as low as ten to the minus 
seventeenth power that of the sun, or 
about a millionth of the best vacuum we 
can produce on earth. Isn’t that so, 
dad?” 


GARDNER jerked his head in 
quick affirmative. His eyes glowed 
proudly on his daughter. “Quite right, 
Deborah. While G 113 seems more 
compact than the average nebula, yet I 
doubt if it is much more dense than the 
tail of a comet.” 

“Then,” she burst out triumphantly, 
“what is there to worry about?” 

“IT used,” observed Steve with 
strained deliberation, “a single drop in 
the form of an unbelievably fine spray 
on that mouse. It diffused through a 
five-gallon tank against air resistance. 
That is a pretty good approximation of 
a vacuum.” 

The hope died in Gardner’s eyes. He 
squared his stooped shoulders. “There 
is only one thing to do, my boy. Pub- 
lish our results. Warn the world. 
Furnish qualified scientists with the gas 
in the hope that they may find a new- 
tralizing agent in time. And pray that 
my first rough calculations are imnac- 


I AM NOT GOD i) 


curate; that the nebula will swing out- 
side the solar system.” 


THE LATE afternoon papers car- 
ried the headlines. 


“FAMOUS ASTRONOMER AND 
NOTED CHEMIST WARN OF 
LETHAL NEBULA. PREDICT 
DOOM OF WORLD UNLESS 
ANTIDOTE FOUND. SCIEN- 
TIFIC BODIES MEET HUR- 
RIEDLY TO EXAMINE 
PROOFS.” 


The cables took up the tale, the radio 
crackled frantically through the ether, 
until, by the second day, not a nook or 
cranny of the civilized world but knew 
of the Cassandralike prediction. 

By evening Steve’s laboratory was a 
beleaguered fortress. The street outside 
was black with reporters, clamoring to 
the heavens for interviews. Sirens 
screamed as motorcycles cleared the way 
through heaving humanity for worried 


scientists, sceptical scientists, and just 
frankly curious scientists in search of 


data. The pronouncements of such a 
combination as Gardner and Dodd were 
not to be treated too cavalierly. 

It was long past midnight before the 
clamor had subsided and the house 
cleared of visitors and barricaded 
against further intrusion. Steve was 
hoarse and his eyes bloodshot from 
much explaining; Gardner’s shoulders 
sagged even more than usual. Only 
Deborah seemed as fresh and neat as if 
she had not been up for two days and a 
night. 

The mouse had been studied from 
every angle, the flask with its deadly 
contents examined with respectful at- 
tention, and the spectra and astronom- 
ical data pored over with immense in- 
terest. The last was something definite. 
There was no question about the posi- 
tion and unusual velocity or of the 
pseudonebulium in its composition. 

Only one ‘thing did Steve refuse, po- 


litely but firmly, to disclose—the method 
for ‘manufacturing the pseudonebulium. 
Inquisitive glances thrast  surrepti- 
tiously toward his apparatus, toward the 
De Graaf machine, but Steve was not 
worried. The synthesis was a matter 
of complicated and laborious steps, and 
not to be fathomed by mere cursory 
glances. 


IV. 


THE THING was a nine-day won- 
der. The newspapers played it up sen- 
sationally; the Sunday supplements 
spread themselves with faked, synthetic 
photographs of cities choking under the 
effects of thick-billowing nebular gases. 
The magazines printed long interviews 
with prominent scientists. Apprehen- 
sion rustled over the earth. Men looked 
up to the heavens for almost the first 
time in their lives, seeking in vain the 
tiny blob of light that might mean their 
ultimate destruction. It was of course 
as yet invisible except to the lenses of 
powerful telescopes. Scientists, medical 
men, furnished with minute samples by 
Dodd, busied themselves with the effects 
of the gas on animals, while a ceaseless 
search for an antidote went on in a 
hundred laboratories. Thousands of 
mice and guinea pigs and rabbits were 
offered up to the cause. 

And everywhere, the animals lapsed 
into their coma, and wasted away gradu- 
ally, the living dead, oblivious of all at- 
tempts to bring them back to normal 
life. The scientists were of course in- 
terested in the new discoveries ‘per se— 
the astronomers over the onrushing 
nebula with its speed that had been 
heretofore associated only with ‘the 
great nebule of the extra galactic uni- 
verses; ‘the physicists were agog over 
the multiple-ionized air; the biologists 
and medical men over the deadly effects 
on life forms. 

But the man in the street was vitally 
interested ‘in just one speculation, and 


74 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


justly so. Nothing else mattered to 
him. If the nebula were to sweep 
through the solar system, and plunge all 
humanity into the strange, wasting 
coma, what profit then the ardors of 
pure science? 

For a few days then the world suf- 
fered a bad case of jitters. Even the 
preparations for war ceased. Then 
seeming sanity returned. The official 
announcements of international bodies 
of scientists were calculated to have a 
soothing effect. In the first place, the 
data on the onrushing nebula was as 
yet too scanty for a prediction of its 
course with anything like accuracy. 

To this, Samuel Gardner promptly 
subscribed. He pointed out that he had 
avowed as much in his very first state- 
ment. Then, too, Deborah’s initial argu- 
ments had been taken almost verbatim 
by the scientists of the world as their 
own. Granting even a direct hit, it was 
argued that, aside from certain possible 
auroralike effects, the earth would not 


even know that the nebula was upon it. 
Concentrations were calculated, vacuums 
were learnedly discussed. Old files on 
Halley’s comet and other earlier en- 
velopments were resurrected and pub- 
lished to the world for its reassurance. 


The excitement died. Men even 
began to laugh good-humoredly over the 
recent scare. Jokes sprang up like 
mushrooms, in which nebula and nerv- 
ous scientists appeared in ridiculous 
lights. The reputations of Dodd and 
Gardner suffered irretrievably from 
their published warning. The rumor 
spread that they were notoriety seekers ; 
that somehow they had intended to profit 
by throwing mankind into convulsive 
fear. Life flowed on an even keel again. 
The interrupted preparations for war 
renewed at an accelerated pace. The 
nebula was forgotten. Astronomers 
watched it carefully, of course, but that 
was their professional business. 

But in a certain chancellery in Europe 
the matter was not permitted to drop so 


easily. The War Lord, resplendently 
military in Nile green, was in confer- 
ence. Close-cropped heads bent over 
outspread maps. 

The War Lord raised his head. 
There was an eager gleam in his feral 
eyes. “Good!” he jerked out in staccato 
fashion. He loved to clip his speech. 
It sounded so military. “The fatherland 
is ready. We will strike, there—and 
there—and there.” His blunt finger 
passed rapidly from red-inked frontier 
to frontier. “Troops, tanks, planes, 
everything is prepared.” 

“Everything,” echoed his councillors. 

The War Lord drummed rapidly with 
his fingers on the table. He frowned. 
“It will not be easy,” he admitted, half 
to himself. “Our spies report the enemy 
is also prepared.” 

A swarthy man in the much-decorated 
uniform of a general said confidently: 
“It is mot necessary to worry. Our 
troops are filled with patriotic ardor. 
They will be irresistible.” 

“Hmmm!” The leader seemed doubt- 
ful. He pressed a buzzer suddenly. An 
aide swung open the door, sprang to at- 
tention. “Show Bollman in.” 

A little man entered. His eyes were 
bright and birdlike, and his mien was 
humble in the presence of the dreaded 
War Lord. 

The dictator fixed him with a cold, 
penetrating stare. He loved to see the 
scientist cringe before him. It inflated 
his ego; it soothed the involuntary feel- 
ing of inferiority he possessed in the 
presence of those who had brains. 

“That gas the American discovered,” 
he commented abruptly. “It works?” 

The little man bowed deeply. “It 
does. Even as the American, Dodd, has 
stated. One hundred monkeys, two 
thousand rabbits, two lions, a tiger and 
an elephant are in comas induced by one 
cubic centimeter of the gas which I 
sprayed into the sealed and leaded en- 
closure of the zoo. They dropped, 


I AM NOT GOD 75 


highness, as if felled, and they have not 
moved since.” 

“And there is no cure?” 

“None whatever. Our staffs have 
tried ; all over the world the laboratories 
are, busy, without result.” 

“And what use,” pursued the War 
Lord, “could be made of this gas in 
war?” 

For the first time the scientist per- 
mitted his head to lift. His voice held 
a confident ring. “A dozen bombs, 
filled with pseudonebulium, dropped 
from a single fast plane over the largest 
city in the world, would release enough 
gas to place every man, woman and 
child in the area into the coma. Hid- 
ing in the deepest cellars, behind the 
thickest walls, could not save them. 
Only lead is impenetrable to its influ- 
ence, and lead chambers to house mil- 
lions, are—well ” He smiled sig- 
nificantly. 


THE DICTATOR glanced sharply 


around the circle of his advisers. Sup- 
pressed excitement was in their eyes, ex- 
cepting only those of the general. He 
was a firm believer in Massenmensch, in 
the massed attack of countless hordes 
of men backed up by heavy artillery. 
Gas and such were mere toys, fit only 
for impractical theorists. 

There was a faint grin of triumph on 
the War Lord’s face as he swung back 
to the respectful scientist. “‘Good!” he 
clipped. ‘Within ten days you are to 
have ready a sufficient supply of this 
gas to fill ten thousand bombs—leaden 
bombs.” The fingers of his right hand 
tan rapidly over his left, as if he were 
ticking off the number. “London! 
Paris! New York!” Satisfaction 
creased his smug features. The world 
was already at his feet. He, that once 
had been the digger of ditches, was 
smarter than those who had sneered 
at him! He had brains enough to avail 
himself of even the nebulz in the heav- 


ens, while his enemies, with their snob- 
bish superior culture 

The little scientist cringed. Alarm 
sprang into his beadlike eyes. His 
hands made helpless fluttering motions. 

“B-but, highness,” he stuttered. 

The War Lord descended rapidly to 
earth. He frowned. “Well, Bollman, 
what is it?” he demanded ominously. 

“We—we can’t get tha} much of the 
gas,” the scientist managed to gasp. 

“Why not?” 

“Because, highness, we do not know 
how to make it. We have tried, and 
tried, but it is so far impossible.” 

The face of the dictator suffused with 
red. A dangerous sign. He took a step 
forward. “The American has done it, 
has he not?” His tone was deadly. 

The scientist went white. “Yes, high- 
ness,” he breathed hard, “but he has 
not told how. And no one else in the 
world has duplicated his method. He 
gave samples to our laboratories, but 
there is only half a- cubic centimeter 
left.” 

The War Lord seized the terrified lit- 
tle man, shook him until his teeth chat- 
tered. “Stupid ass!” he screamed. 
“What good are you? Yow can’t find 
the secret, eh? An American, a pig of 
an American, is smarter than you are, is 
he? Go back to the laboratory, and 
make me that gas within ten days, do 
you hear?” He flung the scientist away 
from him, stood there in apoplectic 
fury. 

Bollman fled to the door. 
highness,” he choked. “Your will is 
law. It shall be done.” And he was 
gone, stumbling in his eagerness to get 
away. 

The dictator rubbed his hands, smiled. 
“There!” he bragged, sweeping his eyes 
arrogantly over the motionless figures 
of his councillors. “That is the way to 
do things.” 

There was a hasty murmur of ap- 
proval. But the minister of propaganda, 
unofficially known as the “brains” of the 


“Yes, yes, 


76 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


War Lord, remarked dryly: “Science 
is a coy mistress. Not even for your 
highness does she disclose her secrets 
on mere command. The ten days will 
pass, and Bollman will feel the sharp 
edge of the ax on his neck, but you 
won't have the gas. There is another 
and a more practical way.” 

“What is that?” the dictator de- 
manded uneasily. He hated the minister 
of propaganda, resented his calm supe- 
riority, but he needed him. 

“Buy the process from the American. 
Offer him money. No American has 
ever refused money,” he answered 
cynically. “It is their god!” 

“You are right.” The dictator 
clenched his fist, pounded the table. 
“That will be your job. Offer him a 
million, ten million! Kidnap him, if 
necessary. With that gas, gentlemen, we 
rule the world!” 

Two weeks had passed since the first 
preliminary announcement. The tumult 
had died. The eyes of the world had 


swerved to the threatening situation in 
Europe. All pretense at concealment 
had been contemptuously cast aside. 
The nations were ready, eager, under 
the lash of skillful propaganda, to surge 


at each other’s throats. Bollman was 
dead, executed secretly as a traitor to 
the fatherland. The ten-day grace 
period had expired, and the requisite 
process had net been forthcoming. 
Then there were other matters to 
divert the attention of humanity. Im- 
portant, all-absorbing matters. A beau- 
tiful woman had killed her lover in 
Paris. The scoundrel had expressed a 
desire to return to his deserted wife and 
three children. The trial was on. The 
jury craned and almost broke their 
necks to see the defendant’s shapely, 
crossed legs. They grinned lewdly at 
the lawyer for the defense—a clever 
man—read certain very passionate let- 
ters with unctuous, sly meaning. The 
courtroom was wired for broadcasting 
so that every detail could be carried on 


the wings of modern inventive genius 
to the tiniest tot in the land. 

In England it was Jubilee Year. The 
King and Queen, the Prince of Wales, 
and all the little princelings, showed 
themselves time and again to a never 
satiated nation. The tableaux were terri- 
fic, the crush almost as bad. The papers 
boasted of the number of loyal subjects 
who fainted or suffered severe injuries 
in the mighty throngs. 

In Germany there was scandal. Some 
one had dared accuse the leader of hav- 
ing non-Aryan blood in his veins. 
More, he had documentary evidence to 
prove his thesis. The nation rocked to 
its foundations. But the matter was 
soon satisfactorily explained. It had 
been all a mistake. The documents re- 
lated to a man who had despicably as- 
sumed the Jeader’s name at birth, in ex- 
pectation of this very vile attempt to be- 
smirch the leader’s purity. He had been 
protectively removed, so had the ac- 
cuser, so had the documents. Every- 
thing was lovely again. 

Russia had no scandals. They were 
not permitted. But they were in the 
throes of renaming every city, town and 
village in the country. This evoked vio- 
lent discussions, accompanied by the 
interminable drinking of, tea. Some 
doddering oldsters insisted that Lenin 
should be similarly honored. At length 
a compromise was reached. A tiny vil- 
lage of some sixty souls, including pigs, 
cows and chickens, was formally chris- 
tened Leningrad, and every one was 
happy. 

But in the United States there was 
the Irish Sweepstakes. By a stroke of 
genius the hospital authorities had tied 
it up with the chain-letter craze. Mail 
a ticket to the top of ten names on the 
list, cross him off and add your own at 
the bottom. Eventually, with the pa- 
tient aid of the mail carriers, over a 
thousand tickets in the great lottery 
would return to you, increasing your 
chances of success just that much. The 


I AM NOT GOD 77 


e 

lottery officials chuckled and took in 
millions of dollars. Every one was in it, 
from bootblacks to captains of finance. 
There was no other topic of conversa- 
tion. A president was elected almost 
without an engrossed nation knowing 
that there had been an election. Not 
half of the people could tell you the new 
incumbent’s name. 


V. 


NATURALLY, a nebula somewhere 
in space, that could not even be seen, 
about which some fool prediction had 


been made, was pushed out of the way. 


It was as dead as last year’s best seller. 

There was one place, however, where 
it was still a matter of grave importance, 
even in the face of these world-shaking 
events. That was the laboratory of 
Stephen Dodd. Gardner had obtained a 
new set of observations. G 113 was the 


order of the tenth magnitude now and 
shifting its codrdinates rapidly. 


“T am afraid there is not much chance 
of its missing us,” he told Deborah and 
Steve gravely. “It is still an approxi- 
mation, but——” 

He stopped. There was nothing more 
for him te say. Steve cast Deborah a 
quick glance. “When do you think the 
collision will take place?” 

“Tf it does, it would be in about six 
weeks from now.” 

Deborah cried out: “Dad! Steve!” 

Six weeks between them and possible 
annihilation. Six short weeks for love 
and laughter and the warmth of human 
relations ! 

Steve clenched his fists desperately. 
“The fools!’ he groaned. “Six weeks 
between them and death, and they won't 
believe.” He flung open the window. 
“Look at them now; going about their 
‘silly tasks as if all eternity were ahead 
of them.” 

The street was thick with traffic. 
Autos moved in a solid queue; pedes- 
trians dotted the sidewalks, intent and 


hurrying; the human ant heap buzzed 
and swarmed. 

“Don’t blame them,” Deborah said 
quietly. “It is not their fault. They’re 
been told by the scientific societies that 
there is no cause for alarm; that you 
and dad are either mistaken or charla- 
tans.” 

Steve swung away, paced the labora- 
tory with hurried steps. “If only the 
entire world threw everything else aside, 
devoted all the resources of civilization 
to the problem, a safeguard, an antidote 
might be found in time, and manufac- 
tured in sufficient quantities to save at 
least a sizable portion of humanity. 
Even lead chambers——” 

“Would be of small value,” Gardner 
pointed out. “There is not that much 
lead in the world. And furthermore, 
one could not live indefinitely in lead. 
Lord knows how long earth’s atmos- 
phere will be permeated with the deadly 
gas!” 

Steve stopped short in his pacings. 
His eyes glittered with feverish inten- 
sity. “At least,” he cried, “we can make 
the attempt. We are men, not animals 
to await extinction with helpless fatal- 
ism.” 

“What would you do?’ 
asked. 

“This! Get together a choice group 
of scientists, those whom we can con- 
vince. Work night and day on an anti- 
dote, build ourselves a lead-lined house, 
capable of being hermetically sealed, 
equipped with oxygenation apparatus, 
stored with food. Perhaps——” 

“That will cost money, lots of it,” 
the practical astronomer interposed. “TI 
have none ; you've used up all your grant 
from the Lauterbach Foundation. In 
the face of the unfavorable publicity 
we've received, no man of wealth would 
dream of financing us.” 

Despair settled on Steve's face. 
“You're right, Gardner,” he acknowl- 
edged heavily. They looked at each 
other, the two men and the girl, feeling 


Deborah 


78 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


the future of mankind to rest on their 
precarious shoulders—a mankind that 
heeded them not and had already for- 
gotten their very existence. 

The doorbell rang—sharp, impatient, 
ominous. Deborah moved quickly, 
opened the door. A dapper, dark-faced 
man stood a moment in the doorway, 
then entered with a courteous gesture. 
His clothes were expensive and of for- 
eign cut; his face was saturnine and 
slightly alien. His quick, dark eyes 
flitted rapidly around the room. His 
black sleek hair was heavy with pomade 
and curled slightly up at the corners of 
his temples. 

“Like Mephistopheles,” 
thought. 

“Pardon me, my dear lady,” he bowed 
and smiled. His English was impec- 
cable, yet tinged with alien intonations. 
“I wish to have the honor to address 
myself to Mr. Stephen Dodd.” 

Steve stepped forward. “I am he. 
What do you want?” 

“Ah!” The man’s eyes rested with 
some astonishment on his youthful, 
powerfully built figure. These Ameri- 
cans were a strange breed. This young 
man should be an army officer, not wast- 
ing his time in potterings around labora- 
tories. He shrugged his shoulders 
slightly. He had a mission to perform. 

“It is an honor, sir, to meet you.” He 
smiled expansively. “My business, is 
unfortunately, of a delicate nature, and 
requires—you understand “ 

“We have something to take care of 
in the lab,” Deborah said sweetly. 
“Come, dad!” She linked her arm in 
his, steered him out. The man’s eyes 
followed her admiringly. Ah, the 
American women were pretty! Then 
they came back, focused sharply on 
Steve. 

“This, sir, is my business. I need 
not inquire if you are in need of money. 
All Americans are, are they not?” And 
he laughed heartily. 

Steve felt a vague dislike for the man. 


Deborah 


But his ears prickled. Money, had he 
said? And how he needed money right 
now ! 

“T could use some,” he admitted cau- 
tiously. 

“Good!” the man said with an air of 
satisfaction. “Sir, I am authorized to 
offer you the sum of one million dollars 
in cash, immediately.” 

For a moment the room swayed 
around Steve. One million dollars! 
Was the man mad or just a practical 
joker? With an amount like that, he 
could 

Steve snapped out of it. “What’s the 
catch?” he demanded. 

“Catch?” His visitor seemed puzzled, 
then he smiled. ‘Ah, I know. One of 
your very charming Americanisms. 
There is no catch—as you call it.” He 
inserted his hand in his inner coat 
pocket, took out an embossed leather 
wallet, spread it open, and delicately re- 
moved a check. He smoothed it out be- 
fore Steve’s astonished eyes. It was for 
one million dollars, payable to Stephen 
Dodd, Esq., drawn on the City National 
Bank of East Haven, and certified. 
Steve recognized the certification as 
genuine. His own very modest account 
was with the same institution. 


IN A DAZE he heard the smooth 
voice of the tempter. “It is yours, my 
dear sir, in return for one very small 
thing.” 

With an effort Steve controlled him- 
self. “And that is——” 

“The exclusive rights to the secret of 
the manufacture of pseudonebulium. 
That is all. Nothing else. Not even 
your services will be required. Quite 
a satisfactory arrangement, is it not?” 

Steve’s head cleared. He was in- 
stantly wary. “I don’t know,” he said 
coldly. “It depends. Whom do you 
represent ?” 

The man seemed surprised. “Does it 
matter? One million dollars is exactly 


‘I AM NOT GOD 73 


the same amount whoever offers it to 
you.” 

“Perhaps,” Steve fenced. “But I 
don’t sell unless I know the buyer.” 

“Even if the amount were raised to 
two millions?” the emissary asked in- 
sinuatingly. 

“Not even for ten millions.” 

The agent of the minister of propa- 
ganda felt the bleed rush to his head. 
What manner of fool was this Amer- 
ican? It was maddening. He had re- 
ceived positive instructions not to dis- 
close his superiors, but one look at this 
most surprising imbecile convinced him 
that he was up against an insurmount- 
able obstacle. Terror seeped through 
him. He knew what awaited him if he 
returned with his mission unfulfilled. 

He took a desperate breath, clicked 
his heels smartly. “It is for his high- 
ness,” he saluted as he spoke the dread 
name, “the War Lord!” He dropped 
his hand, opened his wallet again, and 
took out another check. The fabulous 


figure danced before Steve’s eyes. It 
was for ten million dollars! 


Ten million dollars! His life, the life 
of Deborah, of this smooth-smiling 
tempter who stood before him, of the 
entire world, nestled in the crinkling 
folds of that oblong stretch of paper. 
A vision swam before him of the magic 
ink changing, by a sort of fierce 
alchemy, into a swarm of laboratories, 
into a thousand doctors, chemists, 
biologists, working night and day, 
seeking, searching, for the antidote that 
must exist, somewhere, locked in the 
secret recesses of plants, of trees, of 
drugs, of strange combinations of 
chemicals. Six weeks! What a piti- 
fully short time! 

Then the vision faded. It was a 
dream, an illusion. The War Lord de- 
sired his process. It was to be an out- 
right, exclusive sale. The corners of 
his mouth tightened. He knew what 
that meant. He knew the particular 
brand of idealism his highess affected. 


Pseudonebulium was a frightful weapon 
of destruction, was it not? In the hands 
of the War Lord—— 

What did it matter which way the 
world went to destruction—the hellish 
way of bombs dropping from fast 
planes, or the way of impersonal forces? 
His shoulders straightened. His face 
was grim and hard. If the world must 
necessarily become a mausoleum for 
the human race, let it be without the 
intervention of man’s bloody hands. 

The agent read the look rightly. It 
was a refusal. But he misunderstood 
the cause. He said hastily: “Ten mil- 
lion is the maximum I am authorized 
to offer.” 

Steve fought to steady his voice. “A 
million would have been enough,” he 
said in cold anger. 

The emissary felt perspiration bead 
his dark smooth forehead. Had he 
overbid in his anxiety? Had he—— 

Steve stepped close to him, fists 
clenched, lips writhing contemptuously. 
“Go back,” he lashed out, “to your mas- 
ter. Tell him the process is not for sale. 
I know to what despicable use he in- 
tends putting it. Tell him I'd rather see 
all humanity extinct under the nebula 
than give him even the fleeting satisfac- 
tion of strutting as the ruthless con- 
queror.” The young scientist laughed 
harshly. “Tell him in six weeks time 
we'll all be dead because he and all the 
other fools like him refuse to believe our 
warnings. Now get out!” 

The man moved back a step from this 
insane American. He was desperate. 
Already he felt the ax on his slender 
neck. “T’ll raise it to twelve million,” 
he cried. 

Steve clenched his fists. 
he repeated. 

The agent stared at those capable 
hands in fright, and backed hastily out 
through the door. It slammed behind 
him with a definitive crash. For an in- 
stant he stood rooted to the ground, 


“Get out!” 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


heedless of curious passers-by, staring 
at the obdurate door that meant his very 
life. Then he smiled faintly. It was 
not a pleasant smile. He knew certain 
compatriots of his in this town, men 
who would do the bidding of the War 
Lord. He hailed a taxi and drove 
rapidly away. 

Inside the laboratory, Steve was writ- 
ing furiously at his desk. He barely 
raised his head at the entrance of Deb- 
orah and her father. Six weeks! Six 
weeks! The words patterned them- 
selves over and over in his brain as he 
wrote. The letters piled high before 
him—five, ten, twenty. Desperate ap- 
peals to certain picked scientists, scat- 
tered over the world, with whom he was 
personally acquainted. The letters bris- 
tled with arguments and mathematical 
computations of the deadly penetrative 
power of pseudonebulium, and invited 
them to come posthaste with their fami- 
lies to East Haven, together with all the 
cash at their disposal. 

And high overhead, still unseen to the 
naked eye, a vast cloud of tenuous gas, 
millions of miles in diameter, was rush- 
ing with terrific speed through the cold 
reaches of.interstellar space ; a colossus, 
intent on its victim—a certain small red 
sun and its attendant train of nine cir- 
cling planets. 


VI. 


THREE WEEKS LATER, a hand- 
ful of people gathered in the living room 
of Stephen Dodd’s house. Only a few 
had responded to his appeal. There 
were Samuel Gardner and Deborah of 
course. Also Dr. George Cunningham, 
Steve’s friend, a round, jolly medico 
with a bald, pink expanse of forehead. 
Dr. William Clay, tall and pale and thin- 
lipped, an authority on glandular secre- 
tions and hormones, with his stout, com- 
fortable wife and two little children, a 
boy and a girl. Henry Claiborne, the 
biologist, known the world over for his 


work on the genes of inheritance and 
the mechanism of the cell. 

His weak, near-sighted eyes were eter- 
nally adoring the platinum blonde, 
sinuously curved ex-chorus girl whom 
he had somehow married. But her cal- 
culating gaze; sheathed by long, mas- 
caraed lashes, appraised the men in the 
little gathering with interest, and lin- 
gered longest on the clean-limbed body 
of their host. As for the women, she 
dismissed them with casual contempt, 
except for Deborah. Their glances 
measured. each other, and Deborah 
turned away with a queer feeling of dis- 
like for the exotic, empty-headed crea- 
ture. 

Then there was Herr Josef Kuntz, a 
meek little German scholar, manifestly 
under the thumb of his massive, man- 
nish wife. They had four girls, with 
scrubbed, shining cheeks and _ thick 
flaxen hair neatly braided in pigtails 
down their backs. It was hard to be- 
lieve that Herr Kuntz was a chemist 
whose researches on colloids were classic 
examples of the scientific method. Mon- 
sieur Armand Hanteaux, with his huge 
black beard and expressive shoulders, 
was obviously French. It was not so 
obvious that he had penetrated further 
into the innermost vitals of the atom 
than almost any other man then living. 
He was there alone. Marriage, he pro- 
claimed with Gallic freedom, was an 
institution for fools. He, Armand 
Hanteaux, let other men wear the fet- 
ters, while he—and his bold black eyes 
rested admiringly on the seductive lines 
of Clara Claiborne. 

There was only one other in the little 
company—Oscar Folch, a subject of the 
War Lord. Steve had heard of him 
vaguely as a chemical engineer in charge 
of munitions plants. The fifty invita- 
tions that had finally gone out had not 
included his name. But Folch had 
shown up with a black hand bag swing- 
ing from bony fingers—dark, reticent, a 
man of few words. He had explained 


AST—S§ 


I AM NOT GOD 


Crowds milled cease- 
lessly through the 
cities, staring horror- 
stricken at the boding 
heavens. 


shortly that he had heard of Steve’s 
plan, that he approved, and had come 
uninvited. Steve had welcomed him po- 


litely. He did not connect the appear- 
ance of Folch with the visit of the emis- 
sary from the minister of propaganda 
several weeks before. 

Of the fifty, no others had come. 
Most had not taken the trouble to an- 
swer ; some had written curt, abrupt re- 
fusals, imitating that Dodd was a bit 
cracked, if not a charlatan. A few had 
been more courteous in their regrets. 

Stéve made them a little speech of 
welcome. They were, he told them, the 
sole hope of mankind. Their resources 
were limited, and the time perilously 


AST—6 


short. They were leaders in their re- 
spective fields, and perhaps, by unre- 
mitting cooperative labor, they might 
evolve an antidote, a defense against the 
onrushing nebula before it seeped into 
earth’s atmosphere. 

“And if we don’t?” queried Dr. Clay 
dryly. 

Steve shrugged his shoulders slightly. 
“Sauve qui peut,” he quoted. “We must 
try to save ourselves then. At least hu- 
manity shall not become completely ex- 
tinct. With ourselves as a nucleus, men 
and women and children, we’d have to 
rebuild a world.” 


82 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


Clay’s little girl let out a frightened 
wail. The prospect did not seem to 
please her very much. Deborah flushed 
and held her level eyes steady. Mrs. 
Kuntz sniffed audibly. Her child-bear- 
ing days were over. 

Dr. Cunningham groaned comically. 
“A swell future you’re mapping out for 
us poor bachelors, Steve.” But Han- 
teaux’s eyes were hot and admiring on 
Clara Claiborne. She bridled and shot 
him a long seductive glance. Her hus- 
band glowered at her furiously. It 
was evidently not the first time she had 
given him cause for jealousy. 

“We save ourselves then,” 
Folch said thinly. “How?” 

It was the first time he had spoken at 
the meeting, and his voice jarred un- 
pleasantly on Steve. Was there more 
than a hint of mockery, perhaps, in that 
thin, creaking voice? 

But nothing of that appeared in 
Steve’s tones as he answered. “We'll 
lead-sheathe this house and seal it 
We'll in- 
and 


Oscar 


against the penetrating gas. 
stall air-conditioning apparatus, 
store food supplies sufficient for a year. 
That will be your job, Folch, and yours, 
Hanteaux.” 

“I would prefer working with the 


pseudonebulium,” Folch announced 
calmly. 

The blood rushed to Steve’s face. He 
clenched his hands angrily. Gardner 
saw the explosion coming, and hastened 
to intervene. “There is one thing we 
must all understand,” he told Folch 
gravely. “The project can only be a 
success if there is the strictest discipline. 
Mr. Dodd is the leader. I cheerfully 
submit to his orders and so must every 
one else. It is the only way.” 

Folch glanced inscrutably around the 
circle and saw nods of approval every- 
where. “Very well, then,” he said sud- 
denly, and relapsed into his former 
silence. 

Hanteaux rumbled in his beard. “A 
praiseworthy idea, Monsieur Dodd. 


That is, if the nebular gas does not make 
the earth’s atmosphere permanently 
poisonous. But what you ask for is ex- 
pensive. Have we perchance a Croesus 
in our midst?” 

Steve frowned anxiously. He stared 
at the taut, intent faces about him. 
“T’ve figured the costs,” he said slowly. 
“Tt will take about a hundred thousand 
dollars. I have exactly seventy-four 
hundred dollars, including all spare 
equipment that I’ve already sold. Gard- 
ner, how much have you?” 

The astronomer blinked. “Nine thou- 
sand, which includes three months’ sal- 
ary I managed to persuade the board to 
advance.” 

“And you, Dr. Cunningham?” 

The rotund doctor grinned. “Besides 
my stethoscope, and an inestimable edu- 
cation which cost my late venerated fa- 
ther some twenty thousand, I have 
exactly six hundred and twenty dollars 
and thirty-four cents.” 

Herr Kuntz looked bewildered. “I 
have maybe a few dollars yet. It cost 
all my savings to bring my family here.” 
Hanteaux rumbled something about sev- 
eral thousand; Claiborne was the 
wealthiest, with ten thousand ; Dr. Clay 
had a little less. Steve figured quickly. 
So far the total was about forty thou- 
sand, and there was only Folch to hear 
from. He turned inquiringly to the 
engineer from the realm of the War 
Lord. 

Folch shook his head sardonically. “I 
have,” he bowed precisely, “my travel- 
ing bag—nothing else.” 

A tense silence held them. Even 
Clara Claiborne felt the weight of the 
situation and stopped her ogling. Then 
Steve’s jaw snapped tight. “That means 
the ‘safety first’ idea is out. We'll use 
every cent of it on the finding of an 
antidote. Time is short, gentlemen. 
We'll get to work at once.” 

Not for a moment did the idea enter 
his head that, with the elimination of 
those without funds, notably Herr 


I AM NOT GOD 83 


Kuntz, his wife and four scrubbed chil- 
dren, Dr. George Cunningham, and the 
gninvited Oscar Folch, there would be 
sufficient funds to build a smaller re- 
treat for the moneyed people. 

Deborah felt the thought flash through 
her mind, and dismissed it with a shud- 
der. She was more proud of Steve than 
ever before. They would live or die to- 
gether, all of them. Those poor little 
girls with their shining faces and se- 
rious, pigtailed expressions! But she saw 
the sudden, hard, calculating look on 
Clara’s face as her blue eyes flitted over 
the moneyless ones. The feline beauty 
turned to her adoring husband. “Darl- 
ing!” she gushed, “I don’t see why 

” 


“That’s enough, Mrs. Claiborne,” 


Deborah flared quickly, eyes sparkling 
with anger. es 

“But——” Clara started. 

“You heard what Mr. Dodd said,” 
Deborah repeated firmly. 
final.” 

Henry Claiborne stared bewilderedly 


“His plan is 


from his wife to Deborah, and back 
again. “I don’t understand——” he 
protested. 

But his wife did. She shot a look of 
unutterable hatred at her antagonist, bit 
her lip until the marks showed white 
against the carmine. of her lipstick, then 
smiled sweetly at the nearsighted, blink- 
ing biologist. 

“It is really nothing, Henry, darling,” 
she cooed. 


VII. 


THEY STARTED at once. Not an 
instant could be lost. There were only 
three weeks in which to discover the 
antidote. Steve divided the work with 
swift precision. He took sole charge 
of the manufacture of the pseudo- 
nebulium to be used in the experiments. 
A vague, uneasy feeling made him more 
secretive about the process than ever 
before. Not even to Gardner, his fa- 


ther-in-law-to-be, did he disclose it. He 
shut himself up in the special laboratory, 
and permitted no one to enter its pre- 
cincts. Several times he caught Folch 
in close proximity to the door with its 
intricate lock, but always he had a suffi- 
ciently plausible excuse for his presence. 

The two doctors, Clay and Cunning- 
ham, as well as the biologist, Clai- 
borne, worked cooperatively and with 
feverish intensity on the effects of the 
gas on a hundred newly martyred mice. 
In the laboratory, Claiborne, his uxori- 
ousness forgotten, was a totally different 
man. Quick, accurate in his movements, 
precise. 

Herr Josef Kuntz also sloughed his 
meekness. Chemicals flowed under his 
expert fingers in unending combinations, 
each carefully ticketed, and immedi- 
ately forwarded to the biologic lab for 
injection into the quiet, unmoving mice. 
The original mouse martyr was noth- 
ing but skin and bones. Claiborne 
was positive that the spark of life still 
flickered somewhere in that emaciated 
frame; Clay was just as positive it had 
vanished completely. 

Oscar Folch, in his engineering capa- 
city, built apparatus as it was required 
by the others. There was no question 
that he knew his job thoroughly. He 
rarely spoke, but his eyes darted cease- 
lessly and inscrutably over every nook 
and cranny of the three-story building 
in which they were housed. Without 
quite’ knowing why he did it, Steve, 
after meeting his dark, mocking gaze, 
invariably turned back to his manufac- 
turing chamber to make sure that the 
door was locked. 

Gardner remained at the observatory 
for constant vigil at the telescope, com- 
ing to Dodd’s house only to sleep and 
report. There was no question about it 
now. G 113, the runaway nebula, had 
grown to the order of the fifth magni- 
tude, and was faintly visible to the 
naked eye on moonless nights as a patch 
of wan light near Sagittarius. It was 


84 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


only some twenty billion miles away 
now. At the tremendous speed with 
which it was traveling—15,000 miles per 
second—it would take only another 
fifteen days to engulf the solar system. 

The observations were sufficiently ex- 
tensive by this time for accuracy. There 
would be a direct hit. Gardner’s figures 
agreed with those of other astronomers. 
The observatories of the world were ex- 
cited over the approaching nebula. But 
none of them felt any untoward alarm. 
They announced comfortably that aside 
from a certain luminescence in the 
heavens, there would be no other ef- 
fects. Their calculations, again tallying 
with Gardner’s, proved it to be more 
tenuous than a comet’s tail. What was 
there to worry about, then? The gray- 
haired astronomer came in for a good 
deal of joshing from his associates ; the 
newspapers made merry over the im- 
mured scientists and their families in 
Dodd’s house. “Noah’s Ark,” it was 
dubbed, and the name stuck. 

Yet -even so, the onrushing nebula 
rated headlines in the papers. After all, 
it was the first to penetrate the solar 
system. Scientists prepared delicate 
apparatus to examine and probe the in- 
nermost secrets of the strange visitant. 
It would have received far more atten- 
tion had not the War Lord, tired of wait- 
ing, commenced his long-heralded at- 
tack. Bombing planes smashed huge 
cities, sent long streams of refugees— 
those who survived—into panic-stricken 
flight. Heavy artillery thundered, great 
tanks lumbered like monstrous cater- 
pillars over shell-torn landscapes, poison 
gas enveloped hundreds of miles in a 
dense, searing pall. Millions of men, 
grotesque in gas masks, hurled like gray 
ghosts through the poisoned atmosphere, 
locked in furious combat. Nation after 
nation tumbled into the maelstrom. All 
Europe, all Asia, was aflame with bat- 
tle and sudden death. Only America as 
yet was aloof from the turmoil. 

Naturally, the nebula, now grown to 


a silver disk of light, was unimportant, 
Steve goaned and harried his little group 
to even more furious efforts. Only a 
week remained, and nothing—absolutely 
nothing had been accomplished. Han- 
teaux forgot to stare boldly and lecher. 
ously at the quivering charms of Clara 
Claiborne. His great beard almost im- 
mersed itself in the whirring apparatus 
he had evolved and Folch had con- 
structed. He was attempting an elec. 
trical approach to. pseudonebulium, to 
see whether it could not be deionized 
into normal, innocuous air by tremen- 
dous surges of current. But the strange 
gas was unusually stable, and its multi- 
ple ionization resisted all his efforts, 
The women, under Deborah’s leadership, 
purchased supplies, prepared meals, ran 
the house, assisted their menfolk in the 
laboratories. 

Funds were running low. Equipment 
was. expensive and ate rapidly into their 
modest account. Steve tried desperately 
to interest certain men of wealth, offer- 
ing them dazzling visions of being the 
possible saviors of humanity, of saving 
themselves in any event. He was 
laughed at, and dismissed with mocking 
words. He was a charlatan—the papers 
had said so. He and his associates at 
Noah’s Ark were crazy predicters of the 
end of the world—and besides, there 
were immense profits to be had in the 
sale of munitions and supplies to feed 
the holocaust on the other side. 


STEVE returned wearily from a last 
fruitless appeal. It was night. The 
nebula was plainly visible now, a shin- 
mering flash of light across the horizom. 
Four more days! He shuddered. He 
thought of Deborah, with her steady, 
tender eyes, and felt sick all over. 
There had not been any time for love 
making. And in a few days—— 

There were the others too; the rest 
of mankind. He stared with strange 
intensity after the people as they hut 
ried about their petty affairs, as though 


he had never seen them before. He 
tried to vision them all, moveless, 
shriveling slowly, as the mice had done 
—were still doing. Then his mood 
changed. A fierce anger gnawed at his 
vitals. Half the world was engaged in 
insane slaughter, for no other purpose 
but to feed megalomaniac ambitions. 
They laughed at him and his warnings, 
refused the very small sums, the co- 
operation that might have saved them all 
from a dreadful fate. 

They were not worth saving, he cried 
aloud. A man stopped a moment, 
looked at him curiously. Steve moved 
on hurriedly. He must be in a pretty 
bad fix, he thought, if he began talking 
to himself. 

At the laboratory, they huddled 
around him. He did not have to speak. 
They saw from his face that he had met 
with no success. It had been his last 
hope. To-morrow it would be too late. 

Without a word Deborah came to him 
and put her slender hand in his. “Never 
mind,” she whispered. “You'll manage 
it somehow.” 

He squeezed her cool fingers, shook 
his head soberly. “I think I’m on the 
right track,” he said. “It’s only a guess, 
of course. But there are certain very 
rare and expensive chemicals that I 
need. We haven’t money enough to 
buy them. Money!” He laughed bit- 
terly. “Trash that will be less than 
meaningless in four days.” 

Dr. Cunningham said quietly. “What 
do you need ?” 

“Three grams of radium sulphate, 
half a kilo of metallic scandium, a tank 
of krypton, and two kilos of lutecium 
chloride. Almost fabulous stuff. Kun- 


» gesser’s the only place in this country 


that carries a supply. They quoted me, 
after much scurrying, eighty-five thou- 
sand dollars for the lot. Might as well 
ask for the moon.” 

Dr. Cunningham said even more 
quietly. “You'll have it by to-morrow 
morning.” For once in his life the jolly 


I AM NOT GOD 


85 


grin was gone from his rotund coun- 
tenance. 

A babble rose hurriedly. Gardner 
expostulated. “But how in Heaven’s 
name, George——” 

Cunningham cut him short. “Never 
mind. I said to-morrow morning.” 
Without another word he left the room. 
They heard the front door slam, and 
he was gone. 

Steve shrugged his shoulders. “Poor 
George! The strain’s been too much. 
In any event, to-morrow’s too late. The 
reactions I’ve calculated will take four 
full days, and midnight is the deadline. 
After that each hour, each second even, 
will be just about that much after the 
nebula envelops us.” 

Folch smiled for the first time. It 
was not a pleasant smile. “I think,” he 
remarked thinly, “I can provide you 
with what you need, with money enough 
for all the experimenting in the world, 
within half an hour.” 

They stared at him. Steve’s head 
snapped up. “What’s that?” he de- 
manded. 

Folch repeated carefully what he had 
said. “I can offer you up to ten mil- 
lion,” he stated calmly. 

There was a sensation. Memory 
struggled in the-back of Steve’s mind. 
That was the exact sum with which the 
agent of the War Lord had tempted 
him. 

Anger flared in him, burned down. 
He eyed the spy grimly. “And all you 
want in return is the method for manu- 
facturing pseudonebulium, isn’t it?” 

For the first time Folch betrayed emo- 
tion. He fell back, caught off balance. 
“Why, how did you know?” 

Steve laughed harshly. “Your fel- 
low spy offered me the same amount 
weeks ago. And I turned him down. 
Now go back and tell your master ed 

But Folch had recovered himself. “TI 
don’t know what you’re talking about, 
Dodd,” he stated evenly. “I received 
word from a friend of mine, a million- 


86 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


aife in my country, only a little while 
ago. He is willing to give me that sum, 
but naturally he drives a bargain. He 
wishes to manufacture the gas for cer- 
tain reasons = 

“Your millionaire is the War Lord,” 
Steve broke in furiously, “and I know 
his reasons quite well. His dreams of 
conquest aren’t progressing as smoothly 
as he had thought. The use of pseudo- 
nebulium in sufficient quantities would 
make him absolute master of the world. 
But——” 

Folch’s eyes glinted dangerously. 
“You are a pack of fools,” he flung out 
to the others, ignoring Steve. “Accord- 
ing to Dodd you'll be dead, or what 
amounts to death, in four days. Noth- 
ing can save you now. What does it 
matter if my country gets the secret of 
pseudonebulium? What difference 
would it make to you, to any one else? 
But the money that will be paid you 
would buy those supplies Dodd thinks 
necessary to his antidote. That means 
you will all be saved, while the rest of 
the world, including my countrymen, 
would have passed under the influence 
of the gas.” 

He was sneering covertly now, mak- 
ing mock of their foolishness. Yet it 
was a specious argument, carefully cal- 
culated to win them over to his side. 

Mrs. Kuntz nodded her masculine 
head vigorously. “Do you hear, Josef? 
It makes sense. Say something!” 

Poor Kuntz said timidly, doubtfully, 
“Perhaps then he is right. Maybe it 
would be best . 

Clara Claiborne moved between her 
husband and Hanteaux. Her perfume 
intoxicated the Frenchman, enwrapped 
her husband. Her lips were parted, and 
panic stared out of her baby eyes. It 
had taken her a long time to discover 
just what it was these others feared so 
greatly, and only that morning it had 
really penetrated. Since then she had 
been hysterical. She wanted to live with 
all the ardor of her selfish nature. 


“Give him your silly old secret,” she 


panted to Steve. “I don’t want to die.” © 


Henry Claiborne turned his near- 
sighted eyes on his wife with a strange, 
puzzling look. He said nothing. But 
Hanteaux bowed gallantly to her. “It 
is already done, cherie,” he murmured. 

Steve clenched his hands. “The an- 
swer is no!” he snapped. “Not even for 
a minute would I turn the process over 
to your War Lord.” 

Dr. Clay compressed his thin lips. 
“You forget, my dear Dodd,” he said 
precisely, “that we also have something 
to say concerning our lives. We have 
invested our energies and our money, 
and we may be considered as partners. 
I suggested we take a vote.” 

Steve took a step forward. “Why, 
you ” he started in a choked voice. 
The atmosphere fairly crackled with 
electricity. Folch waited, a saturnine 
look on his dark face. Matters were 


playing into his hands. Then Gardner 
It was high 


moved into the breach. 
time. 

“Just a moment, Steve,” he inter- 
rupted. He faced the others. “You of 
course realize that Folch and his master 
do not believe that the nebular gas will 
have any effect on humanity ?” 

“Naturally not,” Folch answered con- 
temptuously, and stopped short, realiz- 
ing he had said too much. 

“Exactly,” Gardner pursued evenly. 
“Tf they are right, then you have placed 
a weapon in the War Lord’s hands that 
will make slaves of the rest of the 
world. Oscar Folch was sent here de- 
liberately as a spy, to steal the secret, to 
buy it, if possible.” 

“But we believe,” Dr. Clay clipped 
out. “I’ve worked too long with pseudo- 
nebulium to doubt its effects even in 
concentrations approaching a vacuum. 
Folch was correct, even though. he 
thought he was mocking us. They'll die 
from the effects of the gas, whether they 
have possession of the process or not. 
While we at least could pse the money 


“so. ew 8a See Os ft 


mes 


a = 


“2 = & 


I AM NOT GOD 87 


to perfect the antidote on which Dodd 
bases his hopes. What’s wrong with 
that ?”” 


ONCE MORE Steve was himself. 
He could see how plausible the argu- 
ment was to the others. “This!” he told 
Clay. “The formula I evolved is purely 
theoretical at present. From certain 
physical data Hanteaux has furnished 
me, from the knowledge I have of the 
properties of the rare elements I men- 
tioned, it seems to me that they, in cer- 
tain combinations, would remove the 
jonization from the gas and bring it to 
the condition of ordinary air. Clai- 
borne’s experiments have shown de- 
finitely that the peculiar catalepsy it in- 
duces is caused by the permanent fixa- 
tion of the molecules within the blood 
stream. Once pseudonebulium turns to 
un-ionized air, it will bubble out, and the 
effect dissipated. But mind you, this is 
all theory. It may work; it may not. 
If it doesn’t, nothing will matter; sale 
of the secret, or no sale. But if it 
does——” 

“Then certainly we are saved,” Han- 
teaux rumbled. 

“Yes,” Steve flashed back. “But you 
forget that unwittingly I told Folch, as 
well as the rest of you, what materials 
I required. The War Lord has scien- 
tists also, and with more resources than 
we have at their disposal. They will 
duplicate our work, make the antidote in 
enormous quantities, inject it into their 
people. The rest of the world will suc- 
cumb; only the subjects of the War 
Lord will remain.” 

“And ourselves,” Clay amended. 

“How long could we survive against 
his hordes?” Steve flung at him. “Un- 
less we bowed our necks and became the 
meanest of his slaves.” 

There was silence at that. 


Only 
Clara whimpered: “I want to live! I 


want to live!” Her husband quietly 
tdged away from her, his forehead 
puckered with struggling thoughts. The 


others sensed the dilemma, thrashed it 
out in their own minds. Folch, glanc- 
ing keenly from one to the other, saw 
that he had been beaten. He moved 
stealthily toward the door. But he 
could not resist a last attempt. “The 
offer will hold good,” he announced, 
“for exactly three hours more. Until 
midnight. After that P 

Deborah cried out suddenly. “But 
he knows the formula for the antidote 
already, Steve.” 

A snarl of triumph writhed over the 
spy’s dark features. “Fools! Of course 
I do. Go on with your silly Noah’s 
Ark. I'll have both gas and antidote 
within a day. Good-by!” 

He swung around and darted through 
the door. But already Steve had left his 
feet in a long slashing tackle. His out- 
stretched hands caught at Folch’s legs. 
The power of his driving body knocked 
the spy off balance, sent him crashing 
to the ground. Within seconds Steve 
had dragged the stunned, half-uncon- 
scious man within the house, and locked 
the door. Fortunately it was night, and 
no one had seen the struggle from the 
street. 

Within seconds more Folch was 
trussed up and carried bodily to a room 
in the upper story, where he was left 
bound and helpless, a prisoner. 

“That’s that,” Steve said grimly. “If 
humanity becomes extinct, at least the 
War Lord and his legions will not be 
left to inherit the earth. And now let’s 
get back to our work. Perhaps we can 
find some other method of deionizing 
the gas.” 

Despair was on every face. It took 
an effort of will to return. Hope itself 
was hopeless. No one thought of Dr. 
Cunningham’s wild promise. 

It was dawn again. Lights had 
burned steadily in the house. They 
were working day and night now. Sleep 
was a matter of snatches. Steve, hol- 
low-eyed, gaunt, groaned as he gulped 
the hot black coffee that Deborah had 


88 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


brought him. “You're killing yourself,” 
she said anxiously. “You must get 
some sleep.” 

He laughed mirthlessly.- “Look at 
those mice,” he said. “We'll all sleep a 
long time soon enough.” 

“On the track of anything yet?” 

“Not a thing,” he answered wearily. 
“The other formula had at least theore- 
tic possibilities. Now I’m just going 
blind. Hello, what’s that?” 

Downstairs there was a commotion, 
a babble of voices. Then hasty steps, 
clearing the stairs two at a time. Dr. 
Cunningham flung into the room, pant- 
ing, his rosy cheeks white with exer- 
tion. Under his pudgy arms were bot- 
tles. Behind him stout Mrs. Clay stag- 
gered under the weight of a metal pres- 
sure tank, 

“Good Lord, George!” Steve cried. 
“What the devil have you got there?” 

Cunningham deposited his bundles 
carefully on the table. One was a 
leaden tube. Then he straightened, 


gulped twice before he could catch his 
breath. 
“Let’s see now,” he glowed in tri- 


umph. “The lead tube contains radium 
sulphate; over there is metallic scan- 
dium; here is lutecium chloride; and 
that tank Mrs. Clay helped me with 
holds krypton.” 

Steve caught hold of his shoulder, 
gripped him with fierce intensity. 
“How did you get them?” 

Dr. Cunningham’s blue eyes opened 
innocently. “Let go, Steve, you’re hurt- 
ing my shoulder.” Dodd dropped his 
hand. “That’s better. How did I get 
the stuff? Simple. I took it.” He 
chuckled. “Took it when they weren’t 
looking. I really was cut out for a 
burglar. That is a profession. It re- 
quires skill, daring, a certain athletic 
agility’—he winced at the thought of 
something, looked down mournfully at 
his trousers. There was a long rip 
down the left leg. ‘Yes, sir, I mustn’t 
forget the art of tapping a watchman 


not too hard on the head, yet sufficient 
to ” 

“You stole!” Deborah cried, horrified, 

Cunningham turned to her with a hurt 
look. “Stole? No. Just borrowed 
what those idiots won’t need in a few 
days anyway, unless Steve here 

Steve shook his head with a groan 
“Tt’s too late, George. By four hours, 
Your larcenous venture almost saved 
the world against its will. Four little 
hours !” 

Deborah flashed out at him. “Steve!” 
she spoke rapidly, “never mind the four 
hours. Get started. Work as you've 
never worked before. Let every one 
drop whatever they are doing, concen- 
trate on this one thing. Parcel out the 
task so that even a hundredth of a see 
ond is not lost—day or night. Your 
reaction-time calculations may be 
wrong; the nebula may reach here a 
trifle late; its period of filteration 
through earth’s atmosphere may prove 
longer than you anticipate. Hurry!” 

Steve sprang into action. His face 
lighted up, even though inwardly he 
knew all the data had been checked and 
rechecked. But feverish work would 
take their minds off the inevitable doom; 
hope would still flare. He crackled out 
orders. The huge house became an of- 
dered bedlam of activity. Every ome 
pitched in—men, women, and even the 
smallest child—in a gigantic race with 
time, with onrushing death. 


Vill. 


IT WAS the last day. The whole 
colony of Noah’s Ark was huddled im 
Steve’s laboratory, watching with dull 
sleep-bleared eyes the last maddening 
reaction. It was a highly delicate, slow- 
moving affair. A glass chamber held 
the product of days and nights of ceast 
less toil. The scandium and lutecium 
chloride were in complicated combina 
tion with more plebeian elements— 


I AM NOT GOD 89 


phosphorus, hydrogen, oxygen and 
aluminum. 

The formula was of staggering com- 
plexity. The last step consisted in forc- 
ing this black, powdery end-product into 


chemical union with the krypton gas in 


which it was bathed. Now krypton had , 


always been thought to be chemically 
inert ; that is, it would not enter into any 
reaction whatsoever. But Steve be- 
lieved—and so his theoretic formule 
seemed to indicate—that if the two were 
associated in the presence of a radium 
salt, the constant bombardment of 
emitted electrons and gamma rays would 
force them into the desired combination. 
And this combination should, according 
to theory, deionize pseudonebulium. 

But unfortunately the process could 
not be hurried. There was no known 
method to increase the speed of emis- 
sion of radium. All they could do was 
stand by helplessly while the radium 
kept up its constant bombardment on 


the black powder and krypton gas. Be- 
hind the glass chamber was a fluorescent 


screen. It was dark now. When that 
sprang into sparkling brilliance, it would 
mean that the radium emissions had 
finally completely saturated the mixture 
in the chamber, that the reaction was 
complete, and that the free electrons 
were hurtling through to impinge on 
the screen. 

According to Steve’s figures, that 
would take exactly ten hours longer. It 
was now six in the evening. At the 
stroke of midnight the penetrative 
molecules of the nebular gas would 

_have sliced through earth’s atmosphere 
as if it were so much butter.~ Hanteaux 
had proved conclusively, by painstak- 
ing experiments, that even the presence 
of one molecule of gas per cubic milli- 
meter—a vacuum less than that of inter- 
stellar space—would bring about the 
weird catalepsy. 

They stood there, listlessly, watching. 
There was nothing more they could do 


Outside, the sun was setting in a strange 
smoky glow. Nightly the nebula G 113 
had grown in intensity. The night be- 
fore it had been a broad band obscur- 
ing half the heavens. Behind its 
strange, greenish glow only the moon 
and the brightest stars glimmered 


“faintly. 


Now it was rushing with inconceiv- 
able velocity through the belt of the 
asteroids, well within the solar system. 
Nothing could stop its mad flight. Not 
the bulks of Neptune or Saturn, not the 
vastness of Jupiter itself. All were en- 
veloped in the poisonous vapors. Life, 
should there have been any on those 
planets, was wrapped now in wasting 
sleep. Within several hours more Mars 
would go into the trance; within six 
hours earth and all its teeming millions 
would be a huge mausoleum, a grave- 
yard of moveless things. Only plant 
life would go on. The gas affected 
blood corpuscles only, nothing else. 

In spite of the still-confident pro- 
nouncements of scientific bodies, a cer- 


‘tain unease had swept over the world. 


That vast band of greenish light which 
obscured the night sky was terrifying 
enough in all conscience. Suppose, the 
whisper ran rustling around the earth, 
the prophesiers of doom who had im- 
mured themselves voluntarily in Noah’s 
Ark might be right. They had been 
scientists of reputation. 

Crowds milled ceaselessly through the 
streets of the cities, stared upward at 
the boding heavens. Even in shattered 
Europe, the war had languished for 
over a day. The troops refused to fight, 
waiting in their trenches for the fatal 
time limit to pass. It was silly, they 
had been told, but still Desertions 
from the ranks took on the aspect of 
mass movements, as soldiers fled sec- 
retly to their homes and loved ones, in 
case 

The War Lord fumed and stormed 
in vain. He ordered decimation of cer- 
tain mutinous regiments. The men 


RB ASTOUNDING STORIES 


died, .but the living sullenly refused to 
move against the enemy. Then, wisely, 
on the advice of the minister of propa- 
ganda, he backed dewn. Another series 
of executions, and he would have had 
a first-class revolt on his hands. 

The agent he had sent to America 
was not heard from—failure was the 
unforgivable offense—and Folch had 
disappeared, vanished. One could only 
wait for the passage of the nebula. In 
the stillness .of his room the War Lord 
suddenly shivered. Suppose the fools 
had been right; suppose Bah! It 
could not be. To-morrow when the 
dead line had been passed, and nothing 
happened, he would renew the attack 
on all fronts. He would send at once 
a swarm of armed agents in disguise to 
America, to get the secret of the manu- 
facture of pseudonebulium by swift at- 
tack. Then—and a thin, cruel smile 
writhed over his lips. 


OUTSIDE the windows of Dodd’s 
laboratory in East Haven the crowds 
were gathering. Hundreds, thousands, 
until the street was packed solid with 
humanity. As the sun had died away 
in a green haze, the nebula had flashed 
into viridescent splendor. It was an 
awe-inspiring sight. A strange, puls- 
ing glow that flashed across the heavens. 
Growing visibly larger, extending its 
boundaries, minute by minute. Star 
after star wavered, pathetic pin points 
of light, on the edge of the flare, then 
disappeared, swallowed in the maw of 
an insatiable monster. It was ten 
o'clock; two hours more. Mars was 
already penetrated with nebular atmos- 
phere. 

The crowd muttered and shuffled and 
stared upward at the lighted windows 
of the laboratory. The contagion of be- 
lief swept like a great wind through 
their ranks. That terrible green mon- 
ster hurtling through space must be 
poisonous. The fanatics of Noah’s Ark 
had been right. 


Their voices raised in multitudinous 
babble. They cried aloud for aid. Sud- 
denly the bemocked were greeted as the 
saviors of the world. Help us, they 
clamored! The world seemed to arouse 
itself to its peril, at this belated hour. 
The telephone began to ring. Scientists 
phoned, their scepticism wavering under 
the impact of that vast band of green 
light, questioning, asking with carefully 
casual speech about the antidote, if any. 
Then came the deluge. Men of wealth, 
bankers, financiers, captains of industry, 
giants whose lives had been wrapped in 
impenetrable glamour, caught the last- 
minute fear, offered thousands, hun- 
dreds of thousands, millions, for the 
antidote. 

Steve finally cut the wires. It was 
all so tragically ironic. Days earlier, 
money meant possible salvation of all 
humanity. Now, it was so much use- 
less metal, curious symbols of nothing- 
ness, 

But that did not stop the distraught 
men of wealth. Men somehow even in 
the face of death clutched with des- 
perate fingers at the magic metal. 
Multimillionaires forced their way be- 
hind charging bodies of police to the 
locked doors of Noah’s Ark. Steve had 
to talk to them. Otherwise in their ter- 
ror they would have battered down the 
doors. He explained carefully and bit- 
terly how vain their wealth was now; 
that it was too late; that the antidote 
had not been found. 

They did not believe. 


They offered 
fabulous sums, all their fortunes, for 
admittance to the supposed haven of 
safety. They would have smashed their 
way through, had not other forces af- 
rived, convoying other frightened men 


of wealth. Disputes for precedence 
arose, words turned to blows, to pitched 
battles. The street became a shambles 
of struggling, cursing men. Revolvers 
barked, machine guns suddenly clat- 
tered. The crowd fled screaming, 
trampling each other in their mad rush 


I AM NOT GOD 91 


Soon only the dead and the dying were 
left. 

The little group had huddled behind 
barricaded doors while the shout and 
the tumult was on. It was eleven- 
thirty now. One half hour more to 
live. One half hour between life, aware- 
ness, and the creeping sleep of inevita- 
ble death. 

Steve hugged Deborah fiercely, 
openly, unashamed. Life would have 
been so glorious, and now 

They were all silent, even the chil- 
dren. Mrs. Clay held tightly to her lit- 
tle boy and girl. They were whimper- 
ing softly, somehow afraid. Dr. Clay 
was stroking his wife’s hair awkwardly. 
He was not used to emotion. Mrs. 
Kuntz, masculine, domineering, had 


suddenly become pliantly feminine. She 
was clinging with brimming eyes to her 
meek little husband, and he was com- 
forting her. Their four children stared 
with wide, serious eyes on the scene. 


Clara Claiborne was hysterical. She 
cried wildly, again and again, demand- 
ing that Steve do something, that her 
husband save her from the hour of mid- 
night. But her husband stared at her 
curiously with his near-sighted eyes and 
made no move. Steve did not answer, 
nor did Samuel Gardner, sitting quietly, 
with a certain dignified nobility, await- 
ing death. She turned with streaming 
eyes and disheveled hair to Hanteaux. 
The Frenchman, ordinarily gallant and 
attentive, turned away without a word. 

Fifteen minutes to twelve! Steve’s 
eyes were intent on the fluorescent 
screen. Nothing! Its surface was 
blank and dull. He crushed Deborah 
closer to him. Outside, the sky was a 
blaze of green luminosity. There was 
no moon, no stars, only the overpower- 
ing nebula. The street was clear. 
_ Even the groans of the wounded had 

teased. But from afar came the fright- 
ened wail of a city in fear. The nebula 
Was too imminent, too all-pervasive, for 


belief in the assertions of those who 
were optimists. 

Steve said suddenly, “Darling, we 
have only five more minutes.” Their 
lips met in desperate union. For a long 
moment there was silence, punctuated 
only by Clara’s hysterics. No one paid 
her any attention. Then there was an- 
other sound. Of stumbling, fleeing 
feet. Down the stairs they went, across 
the living room. A door slammed shut. 
Dr. Cunningham remarked in casual 
voice: “Friend Folch has escaped.” 

Steve grinned mirthlessly. “Let him. 
It doesn’t matter now—for him, for us, 
for any one.” 

Three more minutes. The screen 
mocked at them with its lusterless sur- 
face. The radium emanations shot 
across the canalized path, impacted 
steadily on the mixture. The black 
powder rested inertly in its bath of 
krypton. It seemed as stable as ever. 

Deborah raised her eyes. They were 
brave and steady. “Steve, I want you 
to put on your lead-impregnated suit 
and helmet.” 

He looked at her in surprise. 
darling ?” 

“In case the reaction goes through. 
The suit will protect you against the gas. 
You might even be able to bring the 
rest of us back to life.” 

Steve laughed harshly. “It will take 
exactly four more hours for the final 
reaction. I can live in that helmet not 
over ten minutes.” 

“Try it anyway,” she urged, “for my 
sake, for the sake of all these people. 
My father Her voice broke; she 
could not go on. 

“All right,” Steve said. “I’ll do it.” 
The others watched him apathetically as 
he thrust his body into the lead fabric 
suit, as Deborah with quick-moving fin- 
gers fastened the helmet into place. No 
one else made a move to help. It was 
silly; it was worse than useless. 


Clara Claiborne let out a wild shriek. 


“Why, 


92 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


Her eyes were wide on the clock on the 
wall. It was striking midnight! 


IX. 


BONG! BONG! BONG! Strokes 
of doom. Hammer thuds counting out 
death to them, death to all humanity, 
death to a swarming earth. The great 
experiment called life was irrevocably 
over. Nothing could be heard but the 
remorseless blows of fate, and the froth- 
ing hysterics of Clara. No one went to 


her as she slumped in her chair in a_ 


faint. 


At once all eyes turned for the last 
time to the screen. Its dull surface was 
unmarred. A deep suspiration went up, 
the sacrificial offering of those about 
to die. They huddled close together, 
like sheep before the butcher’s mallet. 


The last stroke died on the air. Si- 
lence, impenetrable, profound! Even 
the city outside seemed wrapped in silent 
fear. All the earth was cowering in 
the presence of the visitor from extra- 
galactic space. 

For a moment time itself seemed to 
stand still, to stretch itself into an eter- 
nity of expectation. They were a 
tableaux of wax figures, unmoving, 
hardly daring to breathe. God knows 
what emotions each one experienced, 
down to the smallest child, waiting, sus- 
pended between infinitudes. Each in- 
halation might bring with it the deadly 
molecules of pseudonebulium. “They 
had seen what had happened to mice, to 
guinea pigs. 

A minute passed, and the thudding of 
their hearts filled their ears with alarm- 
ing sound. Two minutes. Hanteaux 
stirred. “We are still alive,” he growled 
shakily. 

“That does not mean anything yet,” 
Gardner said calmly. His eyes were 
fixed with painful intensity on his 
daughter. She was clutching the heav- 
ily clothed arm of Steve. 


Thee minutes—four minutes—the, 
five 

Outside, the earth seemed to shake 
itself in bewilderment. A low hum 
arose, the half-hopeful buzz of thou 
sands of voices. It rose in intensity; it 
became a joyful pean of humanity re. 
leased from its fear. The dead line had 
passed, and they had not died. 

Dr. Clay threw back his head .and 
laughed. Hysteria shot through his 
laugh like a scarlet thread. As if.a 
spring had released them, the others 
moved. They jumped to their feet. 
Hanteaux’s eyes glowed on the timp 
form of Clara. He ran to her, lifted 
her up. Claiborne stared at him with 
furious, hating eyes, but did not move. 
The others chattered with the reprieve 
from annihilation. Outside, the pzan 
of joy that swelled from the city’s thou. 
sands had taken on an uglier note. 

Dr. Cunningham cocked his ears. “It 
sounds,” he remarked gently, “as if our 
friends of the human race resent the 


fact that we might have misled them. 
We had better prepare to receive visitors 
shortly.” 

Mrs. Kuntz sprang away from her 
husband.as if ashamed of her excess of 


tender emotion. She glared owlishly at 
the grotesque, motionless figure of 
Steve. 

“It’s all your fault,”~she screamed. 
“You fooled us: you scared me and my 
idiot husband to death. We are penn 
less now, do you hear—penniless! I 
hope they tear you to pieces. Josef!” 
She swept him and the four little girls 
into the compelling folds of her glance. 
“We go from here—now—at once!” 

Josef Kuntz looked at Steve and Deb 
orah imploringly. Then meekly he fol 
lowed her. ‘Yes, Anna!” 

Dr. Clay said maliciously. “Might.as 
well take off your mask, Dodd. To 
bad——’”’ 

He stopped on the word. A puzzled 
expression flitted over his face. His 


I AM NOT GOD 93 


body stiffened. Slowly, very slowly, he 
went toppling to the floor. His stout 
wife screamed, took a step forward, and 
dropped. Steve wrestled frantically 
with the screws of his helmet. 

It had come! The nebula G 113 had 
arrived, seven minutes late, but with 
deadly effect. All around him they were 
dropping, huddles of limbs and clothes 
on the floor, unstirring where they fell. 
God! One frantic thought burned in 
his mind, seared all other thoughts with 
shriveling flame. Deborah! She must 
get that last few minutes of life, not 
he. Her dear face wavered before the 
leaded lenses of his goggles. Something 
was happening to her. Her arm went 
up with infinite slowness, jostled his fin- 
gers. She was trying to prevent him 
from loosening the helmet. Then her 
mouth opened, did not close. He caught 
her as she wilted. He set her down in 
a chair. Horrible stillness reigned in 


the room. All had succumbed to the 
deadly, invisible molecules of the nebular 


gas. The silence spread over the city. 
The storm of voices had cut off ab- 
ruptly. 

He was alone, horribly alone, in an 
inimical universe. Of all the earth and 
its teeming millions, he only was still 
alive. The last poor solitary specimen 
of the curious thing called life. He 
strode clumsily to the window, stared 
out. The street was a graveyard. The 
dead and the living dead were indis- 
tinguishable. Nothing stirred. Hun- 
dreds of bodies lay in the sleep that 
would never end. He raised his eyes 
to the heavens. The nebula was a green 
flame enswathing the sky. It was a 
glowing pall that draped the earth it had 
doomed to extinction; it danced and 
mocked with hellish fires. 

Steve lifted his fist and shook it 
fiercely at the merciless visitor from 
outer space. He, the last man on the 
lifeless ball called earth, cursed it and 
shouted senseless defiance. The skies 


seemed to rock with cqsmic laughter at 
their puny antagonist. G 113 had done 
its appointed task. Within a day it 
would vanish, trailing its frightful 
speed farther out into space, seeking 
new solar systems, new galaxies, new 
universes to stifle with its tenuous 
breath of destruction. 

Steve choked suddenly. His futile 
curses had used up the air in his hel- 
met. He gulped and breathed in no 
oxygen. His chest labored, his heart 
hammered. He staggered back into the 
room. He would die at Deborah’s side. 
Die, too, cleanly and swiftly, by the 
cataleptic trance of pseudonebulium, not 
by the horrible retchings of suffocation. 
He tore with frozen fingers at his hel- 
met. The screws turned slowly. His 
tongue lolled out of his swollen mouth. 
Air! Air! Poisoned or not! Anything 
but this frightful choking sensation. 

Ah! There it was coming! Another 
turn and the helmet would drop back. 
He would take one blessed gulp, then 

His fading eyes lifted for a last 
look at the peaceful figure of anton. 
They wavered on her, blinked. 

The fluorescent screen was a glitter- 
ing sparkle of dazzling, tiny pin points! 
Within the glass chamber the black 
powder had disappeared. In its place a 
dark-red liquid caught the light, winked 
at him with beaded bubbles. The reac- 
tion was complete! 

Complete? What tragic irony? All 
were dead; he was dead, or as good as 
dead! The blood was roaring in his 
ears, his throat a tight constriction of 
fire. His feet, weighted with the leaden 
fabric, were rooted immovably to the 
floor. Too late! Everything was too 
late! Even if that wine-dark liquor 
held the elixir of life, even if it were 
capable of its theoretic possibilities! 

Pain racked his frame. His heart 
seemed to have stopped its pumping. 
The room was growing dark around 
him. His eyes drooped, clung dimly to 


94 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


the still form of Deborah. Deborah! 
Brave girl! She had urged him on, she 
had never given up hope. She—— 
He was failing her, was not worthy of 
her confidence. The thought fumbled 
in his clogging brain, swirled around. 
He was failing her. -Darling—must not 
—the haze deepened—he moved some- 
how. His legs were tons, but they 
moved—moved toward the glass cham- 
ber. The screen seemed to swell, the 
coruscating sparks filled the room, the 
universe itself, 

His fingers were not a part of him. 
Yet instinctively he knew they had 
picked up the plunger hypodermic that 
lay prepared on the stand before the 
chamber. In a red blaze of gasping 
lungs he knew that somehow he had 
turned the pet cock, that the red liquid 
had poured into the basin before it. 

He was only semiconscious now, yet 
under the driving impact of Deborah’s 
trust, his gloved, icy fingers held the 
hypodermic steady in the new-born 


liquor, sucked it up. The last movement 
was unbearable agony, yet it was com- 
pleted. There was no time for zipping 
open the suit, no strength for it. With 
the last expiring spurt of superinduced 


energy he drove the sharp needle 
through the thick fabric, through the 
skin and flesh of the arm beneath. The 
plunger went home. 

Even as it did, he dropped as if shot. 
The deadly molecules of pseudonebulium 
had sped aleng the steel of the needle 
as if it were a tenuous medium, had 
penetrated into the blood stream. .Gas 


and ‘theoretic antidote flowed simulta- 
neously through his body. 

His head struck heavily against the 
floor. Cataleptic rigor seized his limbs. 
There was a splintering crash. The 
lead-glass windows of his helmet had 
smashed. Air streamed inside. A sec- 
ond’s awful clarity while his mouth and 
nostrils involuntarily gulped in the rush 
of oxygen. Too late, too late! His 
head sagged to one side, and he was 
still. 

The laboratory was a huddle of un- 
moving forms. The city of East Haven 
was a vast mausoleum housing the sleep- 
ing dead. All over the world life had 
ceased. Ships swung pilotless to the 
beat of the waves, railroad trains thun- 
dered along steel rails until fires foun- 
dered, or they went splintering and 
crashing into stalled trains ahead. The 
armies lay in their trenches, heaps of 
moveless uniforms, locked in the same 
strange embrace of life-in-death. The 
War Lord sagged over the maps in his 
private chamber, arms spread greedily 
over territory that he could no longer. 
conquer. The animals lay in the fields, 
and the birds had dropped like plummets 
to the ground. 

The earth revolved ceaselessly in 
space, on its appointed orbit around its 
mother sun, feeling no longer the slow, 
crawling progress of parasitic life across 
its stony bosom. And overhead, all 
around, interpenetrative, the nebula 
mocked with green fires, careening 
through space with unbelievable speed, 
its unknown destiny still unfulfilled. 


To be concluded. 


Next month Nat Schachner tells how a man tried to guide the 
destinies of a new world. It is a very human, very thrilling con- 


clusion to a great story. 


A Princess of Pallis 


by Clifton B. Kruse 


‘Ve 


Y\ 


Two scaly bodies were. on the floor of the plot 
deck. Even now the girl’s gun was leveled—— 


were baggy and the blue tunic 
unbuttoned disturbed him not at 
all. Lieutenant Mardico of the Flying 
Engineers weaved his joyous and song- 
ful pace down the King’s Highway, 


VHE FACT that his red breeches 


trusting a spaceman’s indispensable 
sense of place and direction to carry him 
safely to Dock 908, engineering field, 
within the next two hours. 

What matter if Wiljon Kar was stew- 
ing? Old Mardico launched into the 


96 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


forty-second verse of the “Dirge of the 
Dying Spaceman.” It was a very sad 
song. It made old Mardico conscious 
of a spaceman’s duty. He quickened his 
steps. Special engineering transport 
W62 was even now warming her torps 
for a 9 p. m. take-off. And Wiljon Kar 
was for spinning a ship’s grads in the 
very split second of scheduled time. 

It was eight-fifty when old Mardico 
‘hove into sight of the space-pocked W62. 
The sight of the grand ship made him 
tingle all over. Darkness had already 
enshrouded the International Territory 
of Toronto. Nevertheless, Wiljon Kar 
had left the main port ajar. A hazy, 
yellowish glow of light gleamed from 
the ship. Old Mardico stumbled for- 
ward eagerly. 

This week’s celebration in Toronto 
thad been a glorious let-down. But 
from the wabbly functioning of his 
knees, old Mardico was faintly conscious 
that even such a veteran spaceman as 
he could miscalculate the quantity of 
toulek which might within reason be 
permitted to trickle and burn a calloused 
‘throat. 

Abruptly Mardico stopped in his 
‘tracks. He was a scant fifty paces from 
ithe W62’s main port when some one 
brushed past him, running swiftly to- 
ward the transport. 

Mardico called out, started forward 
in a heavy, lurching trot. At the sound 
of-old Mardico’s voice the shadowy run- 
mer halted, turned about. The hazy 
‘light glinted momenarily upon yellow- 
ish hair and wide, blue eyes. Then the 
seeming apparition turned and dashed 
into the port. Steel slammed against 
steel as the port locks. meshed into the 
casing. 

Old Mardico choked, sputtered. 
She’d slammed the port right before his 
nose, she had! And it was a_girl, a frail 
blond sort of girl! Maybe he’d fright- 
ened her so that she dashed in from 
fear. 

Old Mardico’s fat bulk tumbled back- 


ward. His head slammed against hard 
earth. Before his horrified gaze the 
W62 pulsated into life. Her twin 
graduating torps were spinning their 
fiery spirals. Swiftly, evenly and with 
perfect acceleration, the W62 sailed sky- 
ward. 

Old Mardico slobbered frantically, 
“They've gone—they’ve gone—they’ve 
gone and left old Mardico behind. It 
was that female—she fooled *em—made 
Wiljon Kar think it was I who battened 
the port re 

The fiery dot became smaller and 


smaller. Mardico got to his knees, 
tubbed his head. He couldn’t think 
Straight. He tugged at his beard and 


stared. up at the speedily diminishing 
glow. The W62 was still firing her 
grads. She was hardly beyond the 
stratosphere yet. 

In another thirty minutes Wiljon Kar 
would blast the main torps with the 
ship’s nose pointed toward Juno. In 
another thirty minutes! Old Mardico 
trembled. His massive fists were 
clenched. Something told him that Wil- 
jon Kar and Prock were in trouble and 
would be needing him. 

Fieldmaster No. 23, on night duty in 
the engineering section, jerked into 
wide-eyed wakefulness. Somebody was 
Toaring for him to wake up and was 
shoving a blue sheet report under his 
nose. No. 23 rubbed his eyes, recog- 
nized the hard-fisted old spaceman as 
Lieutenant Mardico of the W62. 

“Great Polaris!” No. 23 shook ‘his 
head. “I reported the W62 as having 
cleared the field an hour ago!” 

“She did but we're not here for wind- 
jamming. Do you see this blue sheet?” 
Mardico’s eyes narrowed as he handed 
the report to No. 23. “You can see for 
yourself, as ‘master engineer, Wiljon 
Kar is needing the X282. He’s assigned 
me to follow. She's all ready over im 
Dock 718. All-you have to do is file the 
report and flash me the release of trans- 


port X282.” 
AST-6 


A PRINCESS OF PALLIS 97 


The fieldmaster was clearly befud- 
died. As a member of the world- 
famous crew of the W62, Lieutenant 
Mardico’s signature upon a transport 
release was virtually as legal as that of 
a master engineer. 

“You mean you want the X282—to 
follow? You're not going to pilot that 
crate alone out in space, are you?” 

Mardico’s fist crashed upon the desk. 
“Listen! Why do we have fieldmasters 
if not to release ships? I tell you I 
have everything ready. It is an emerg- 
ency. You have my signature on the 
blue sheet and. 2 

It was ten-fifteen by the clock when 
old Mardico battened the ports of the 
X282. He had remembered seeing the 
old freighter blast in from Venus four 
days before : and though fieldmaster No. 
23 did not know it, the X282 had really 
been stocked in order to carry a load of 
freight to Mars. But, by the time the 
bewildered fieldmaster would. discover 
the mistake, Mardico would be thou- 
sands of miles beyond Earth. 

X282 leaped skyward; In the plot 
deck of the old X-type freight. trans- 
port Mardico heaved and sweated. The 
blast from Earth had nearly flattened 
him. Unlike the later transports such 
as the W62, the X types had no grad- 
uating torps. Instead of a gradual rise 
due to the spinning grads, the X type 
jerked spaceward in a series of straight- 
fire blasts. 

Mardico hunched over the control 
panel. His jaw worked viciously upon 
the fistful of weechie he had rammed 
into his mouth. His stout old body 
quavered rhythmically with the steady 
barking of the X282’s ring of. second- 
ary, or space-mounting torps. The plot- 
tograph abeve the controls he utterly 
disregarded. 

Old Mardico could drive a transport. 
He knew every bolt and screw of. either 
an X or a W type. But he could not 
plot an arc. He had blasted in the gen- 
eral direction in which the W62_ had 

AST—7 


sailed. And now he was scanning the 
telescopic reflector plate for a flash of 
fire. 

Suddenly he shouted. His tremulous 
old voice rang out above the monotonous 
space whine. Mardico was tense now. 
His eyes did not leave the reflector. He 
was blasting to line that flashing red dot 
within the center of the visor plate. He 
let her take the main torps at full blast 
now. Madly the X282 charged for- 
ward. She was tailing the W62. Mar- 
dico drove her for all she’d give. 


ABOARD the W62, Wiljon Kar 
carefully rechecked the indicated results 
of the third angular swerve within an 
hour. Beside him sat Prock intent 
upon his perusal of their flying orders. 
Special engineering transport W62 had 
blasted from Earth under sealed orders. 
Not even the fieldmasters and other 
petty officials had word of her destina- 
tion. 

The W62 usually carried a trusted 
and honored crew of five: Master Engi- 
neers Wiljon Kar and Prock, Lieutenant 
Mardico, guard detail, and two me- 
chanics, Hals and Twombley. This was 
the council’s most honored and trusted 
crew among all spacemen. Wherever 
trouble arose, the council need only dis- 
patch the W62. If human courage and 
intelligence could solve the problem the 
crew of the W62 would do the job and 
do it right. 

“Mardico was barely on time.” Wil- 

jon Kar turned from the controls for a 
moment’s relaxation. “He signaled the 
ready signal at precisely eight fifty- 
nine.” 
“So I observed,’ Prock mumbled 
without lifting his gaze from the clip 
of special orders. “Hals and. Twombley 
were in their bunks shortly after sun- 
down. Which reminds me, we've not 
heard.a squawk from Mardico since we 
blasted from Earth. Suppose anything 
is wrong?” 


Wiljon Kar shook his head; “Proba- 


98 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


bly primed to the gills and passed out as 
soon as he flopped on the acceleration 
absorber. Let him sleep it off. There'll 
be plenty of work when we reach the 
area of the asteroids. By the way, have 
you a clear idea of the problem on 
Juno? Professor Anger started to tell 
me when Councilman Schwartz inter- 
rupted.” 

“It isn’t only Juno.” Prock’s voice 
- became sharp with interest. “Anger 
wants us to give particular attention to 
Pallis. Records show that this planet- 
oid is a free-claimant possession of a 
man named Tradine. As a matter of 
fact this Tradine was presumably killed 
a decade ago while doing a bit of free- 
lance adventuring in his own ship. 

“He made his money raising and 
transporting the Plutonian scale beasts 
for field work on Mars and Earth. He 
was a queer devil—but amazingly bril- 
liant—and mad for gold. It seems he 


spent all his earnings in carrying on his 
constant series of gold-hunting expedi- 


tions among the planetoids. A few 
years before his disappearance he did 
establish his claim upon Pallis. 

“However, this may have nothing to 
do with our problem. We're to look out 
for some strange force suction near 
either Juno or Pallis. I don’t quite un- 
derstand it, Wiljon Kar. It seems that 
the last cargo train from Jupiter barely 
escaped it. Got near enough to describe 
the effects though. It’s a cone of cloudy 
energy with a vortex somewhere be- 
tween Juno and Pallis. There have 
been four transports lost within the past 
two months—all heavy X-type freight- 
ers returning from Jupiter with full 
cargoes. It seems that——” 

“Hold it!” 

Wiljon Kar straightened up over the 
controls. He was staring intently at the 
light fluctuations upon the plottograph. 
Carefully now he made certain angular 
calculations. 

“We're being followed!” 

“What?” Prock moved over beside 


him. Both master engineers were study- 
ing the glowing red dot which indicated 
a transport to be dogging their flight. 
Now Wiljon Kar was cutting sharply 
away from their original course. He 
blasted ahead with a sharply increased 
acceleration. They observed the red 
dot. It made a similar curve, though 
with erratic jumps. The pursuing 
transport was driving toward them at an 
acceleration which was noticeably great. 
The W62 curved again. The pursuing 
transport did likewise. 

Wiljon Kar increased the speed of 
the W62. At such a rate they would 
be powerless to avoid any chance meteor. 
The whine of the ship’s beams arose to 
a shrill pitch. The stench of super- 
heated oil pervaded the decks. Still the 
red dot glowed with ominous intent 
upon the plottograph. 

“We may have to arouse Mardico 
yet,” Prock was muttering. ‘We might 
need a gunner. Great Sirius, Wiljon 
Kar, do you think is 

A noise at the door behind them 
startled the two engineers. Though 
Wiljon Kar kept his attention to the 
controls, Prock turned around. He 
stepped forward, eyes widened. 

“Who—who—what e 

With a deft kick the girl slammed the 
door shut. Her left hand nervously 
brushed at the strands of yellow hair 
which tended to straggle into her eyes. 
But her right hand remained closed 
tightly upon the bulge in her jacket 
pocket. 

Her voice was low, soft, and scarcely 
above a whisper. Nevertheless, it was 
steady. “You will continue your flight, 
gentlemen. In the name of the King 
of Pallis, I command the Wé62.” 

Wiljon Kar whirled around. His 
deep-set black eyes fisst widened and 
then became hard, expressionless. The 
girl met his gaze, held it calmly. 

“At such a speed,” she suggested, 
“you had better attend to your con- 
trols.” 


A PRINCESS OF PALLIS 99 


Wiljon Kar’s mouth tightened to a 
narrow, colorless slit. Though he was 
unconscious of the gesture, one hand 
tugged at a jet-black forelock. His gaze 
held to the face of the girl—clear blue 
eyes, features strong yet not unlovely. 
Somewhere he had seen her before. That 
voice, now, where had he heard it be- 
fore? Athalon upon Mars, or more 
likely Jupiter? He wasn’t sure. Yet 
there was something about her 

“Your controls! Watch out; the 
pressure beam is——” 


A SHARP hissing blast cut into the 
girl’s screamed warning. Instantly Wil- 
jon Kar whirled around, yanked with 
both hands upon the deck isolator lever, 
then with a deft kick released the feeder 
gear. A weird moan trembled over the 


ship as the fire-belching torps were 
abruptly checked. 

“A compensator tube burst,” Wiljon 
Kar barked. “Above lunar storage deck 
—it'll be soaked with boiling oil—Betel- 


geuse! Had it been above any of the 
other ——”” 

A sharp scream burst from the horri- 
fied girl. Her eyes widened strangely. 
Her face became drained of all color. 
Her hands were no longer upon the gun 
in her jacket pocket. Tremblingly she 
extended them toward Wiljon Kar, 
stumbled hysterically toward him. 

“They—they were on—on the lunar 
storage——- They—oh, help——” 

It was Prock who leaped forward in 
time to grasp her inert form. She 
seemed scarcely more than a child to the 
elderly master engineer as he carried her 
across the deck to the cot. 

“They” were hiding in the lunar stor- 
age deck. Wiljon Kar was mumbling 
to himself, shaking his head in bewilder- 
ment. Who were they? Then he 
shuddered. The compensator tube had 
burst with the W62 at full acceleration. 
Whoever had lurked upon that deck had 
suffered a most shocking death. There 
had been a good hundred gallons of 


superheated oil in the compensator tube 
above the narrow shaftlike storage deck. 
Abruptly Wiljon Kar shook himself to 
free his mind of the ugly thought. 

He was back at the controls. The 
plottograph glowed ominously red now. 
For the moment he had quite forgotten 
that mysterious pursuing ship. It was 
gaining rapidly. Wiljon Kar stared at 
the plottograph grimly. His hands 
shook as he rested them lightly upon the 
controls. A full quarter hour must 
elapse before he would dare fire the 
torps again. 

The W62’s speed would hold by sheer 
momentum, but it would not be great 
enough to overcome the fierce drive of 
that other ship now. With one com- 
pensator tube gone he would dare use 
but one half acceleration. 

Prock’s words jarred him. “She is 
resting now. I have removed her gun 
and locked her wrists to the wall 
chains.” 

Wiljon Kar nodded. “Then call Mar- 
dico at once.” He indicated the red 
glow upon the plottograph. “We may 
need a gunner soon.” 

Prock switched on the ship’s radio- 
phone. There came no response. Again 
he flashed a call; still no answer. Prock’s 
gaze met Wiljon Kar’s significantly. 

“T’m going below,” he mumbled. 
“They’ve done something to the crew.” 

Wiljon Kar was blasting the W62’s 
torps again when Prock returned. 
Twombley and Hals shuffled in ahead of 
him, their faces strangely set. As Wil- 
jon Kar turned from the controls, Prock 
closed the door sharply, hurried across 
the room. 

“Mardico did not reach the ship,” he 
reported tersely. “Hals was in his bunk 
and Twombley stood in the ramp just 
within the outer port hall. There were 
three “2 

“Tall and covered with brown scales, 
sir,” Twombley gulped and sputtered his 
words forth. “Nary a human thing 
about ‘em was there and I can swear it, 


100 


Wiljon Kar, for I’m never one to taste 
a drop of roulek.. They pinned me to 
the wall, got Hals here right in his bunk. 
Then just as they were hoisting me in 
the air I caught sight of a girl coming 
on a run through the port. Slammed 
the port pronto, sir, and then barked 
something to the beasts which had me. 
They put me in my bunk, tied me fast, 
sir. And that’s all——” 

Wiljon Kar’s face showed relief. 
“Then Mardico wasn’t a prisoner on the 
storage deck. Praises! I had feared 
that——” 

“But those beasts, Wiljon Kar, they 
were 3 

Prock interrupted: ““Doubtlessly were 
hidden on the lunar storage deck by this 
girl. Is that it?” 

The girl tried to get up. Then notic- 
ing the chains which bound her wrists 
close to the wall she shrugged and lay 
back upon the couch. Her eyes, bril- 
liantly blue now, stared with cold, silent 
defiance at the astounded crew. 

“That’s she!” Twombley jumped, 
backed, away from the girl. His quaver- 
ing forefinger pointed toward the mys- 
terious prisoner. “She it was who com- 
manded the brown scaly beasts. She 
closed the port and signaled for the 
blasts!” 

With nervous impatience Prock mo- 
tioned the excited mechanic for silence. 
Wiljon Kar was back at the controls. 
The crippled ship careened in sickening 
lurches and quick turns. Yet, even as 
he struggled to break away, the strange 
ship behind them held its pace with 
dogged determination. 

The eyes of all those others on the 
plot deck were fixed upon the pilot’s 
tense manipulations. Their bodies 
swayed awkwardly with the odd gyra- 
tions of the ship as Wiljon Kar fired a 
succession of side blasts. The red glow 
upon the plottograph swung from point 
to point. The other ship was equal to 
every maneuver of the W62. In steady 
acceleration alone they might outdis- 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


tance the pursuer. But with one com- 
pensator tube gone such a course was 
definitely prohibited. 

Hals swung his huge body across the 
room. The face of the blond giant was 
muscled in passive restraint. 

“Wiljon Kar, sir,” he said sharply, 
“shall I aim the guns?” 

The master engineer mopped a sweat- 
streaming forehead. His jaw was set 
with grim determination. 

“Take charge of the gun deck, Hals. 
Twombley will assist you. We'll show 
them that if the Flying Engineers know 
little about fighting they know even less 
of how to surrender.” 

The hands of the clock checked a full 
thirty Earth minutes. The beams of the 
W62 hummed a low-pitched wail. 

Prock came over beside Wiljon Kar. 
His voice was strangely calm, unemo- 
tional. 

“She’s a scant quarter measure to our 
heels. Shall I take the controls?” 

The Wé62 lined out in a straight blast. 
Wiljon Kar studied the red glow. At 
a quick command from him Prock 
checked the power. The gun signal 
flashed. The W62 quavered with the 
discharge. 

“Full blast ahead.” 

Yet scarcely had the command been 
uttered when a thunderous roar echoed 
throughout the hurtling transport. Wil- 
jon Kar stumbled the width of the room, 
A low groan came from the girl. 

Immediately the door burst open. 
Twombley staggered into the plot deck. 

“They hit us—tore away our muzzle 
points—we can’t fire Hals is work- 
ing on the guns—but he says to tell you 
they’re completely smashed !” 


LIEUTENANT MARDICO spat- 
tered the far wall with a vigorously 
exuded mouthful of weechie, reared 
back in the pilot seat and brushed the 
yellowish stain from his wiry gray 
beard. It was a gesture of triumphant 
satisfaction. It had been a perfect shot, 


Se Sa ey 


One expertly aimed discharge had 
leaped forth with uncanny accuracy and 
burned out the W62’s guns. 

The beams of the old freighter 
groaned with ear-splitting shrillness. She 
was a strong ship, built to carry tons 
of freight from planet to planet through- 
out the interplanetary’s universe-wide 
territory of commerce. Although Mar- 
dico had poured in a maximum flow of 
fuel since blasting free of the strato- 
sphere, still the X282 roared on without 
a sputter. 

Mardico mopped his neck, took an- 
other pull from the stone tankard on 
the seat beside him and straightened his 
massive shoulders for the grim business 
ahead. The W62 was a much smaller 
ship than the X282, but twice the length. 

Mardico’s plan of attack was simple: 
He'd drop the X282 astraddle the engi- 
neer’s transport, right behind the ob- 
servation port. He didn’t know what 
had happened to Wiljon Kar and the 
others. Maybe they were dead. But 
one thing was sure! Either he’d rescue 
oravenge. And there was a steely hard- 
ness in his eyes which matched the bull- 
dog thrust of his bristly chin. 

The impact crumpled three muzzles of 
the row of secondary torps upon the 
underside of X282. Simultaneously the 
two anchor cups became fixed in their 
magnetic grip upon the slim ship’s hull. 
Now the torps of the freighter were no 
longer firing. It was as if some mon- 
strous eagle were carrying aloft an in- 
ctedible, fire-breathing demon of the sea. 

A stab of blue-green fire spat from 
the squatting transport’s forward guns. 

The fluorescent mist coiled about the 
W62’s observation port. The bird of 
prey seemed to be gnawing at some vital 
part of its victim. Swiftly the stream 
of energy faded; nevertheless, the steel 
and transparent silico iron of the ob- 
servation port glowed a vivid red. 

Over his space suit Mardico had ar- 
tanged the thick armor of Venusite 
plates. Designed particularly to protect 


A PRINCESS OF PALLIS 101 


the space guardsmen from all manners 
of rays, the Venusite plates glistened 
with scintillating brightness. The 
softened walls gave before Mardico’s 
smashing blows. He was inside the 
We2. 

“Wiljon Kar! Prock! Wiljon Kar!” 
Lustily old Mardico called through the 
radiophone. “It’s Mardico!” 

Beneath his padded armpits extended 
the nozzles of two liquid-fire guns. A 
door at the lower end of the ramp 
opened. Wiljon Kar came running to- 
ward the grotesque figure. And behind 
him came Hals, unashamed of the tears 
which glistened in his eyes. 

“It’s Mardico all right.” Wiljon 
Kar was shouting in his radiophone for 
the benefit of Prock and Twombley 
back in the plot deck. “He trailed us in 
an X-type freighter. We should have 
known. No one else would have been 
fool enough to blast away from Earth 
aloné.” 

Mardico tossed aside the Venusite 
armor. Hals was alternately assisting 
him to free himself of the cumbersome 
equipment and pounding the old guards- 
man upon the back. 

“And I figured ’twas a stinking plot 
0’ evil sorts.” Old Mardico’s words 
tumbled excitedly from his weechie-filled 
mouth. “Says I to myself, ‘’Tis never 
the day will come that sees Wiljon Kar 
playing such a scurvy trick upon his 
faithful guard.” Too many times have 
we visited hell together to thumb our 
noses at the hairy one himself. A plot 
it is. Some rascally crook has in mind 
to steal the W62 with her crew aboard. 
And so I think to myself of the X282 
which is all ready for 2 

The thunder of an explosion racked 
eardrums. The W62 quivered, seemed 
to lurch to her side. The explosion 
tossed Wiljon Kar down the tramp. 
Both Mardico and Hals sagged stupidly 
against the walls. 

Abruptly the transport blasted for- 
ward in desperate acceleration. The 


102 


force flattened all three of the men to 
the ramp, seemed to pull the very air 
from their lungs. 

“Prock! Prock!” Strangely his voice 
echoed against the broken radiophone. 
Wiljon Kar hauled himself to his feet. 
Again he called. And again no response. 
The W62 was tearing through space at 
a dangerous speed. What had hap- 
pened? Wiljon Kar tried the door at 
the lower end of the ramp. It had been 
locked from the other side. 

“Prock doesn’t answer!” Wiljon Kar 
shook his head to clear it. The sudden 
acceleration had made him dizzy. He 
was acutely conscious of Hals and Mar- 
dico as the two stared toward him ex- 
pectantly. 

“It’s that girl,” Hals was mumbling 
and rubbing his head. “She must’ve got- 
ten loose—done something to Prock and 
Twombley—or else—or else there were 
some more of those brown scaly things 
hidden somewhere on the ship besides 
on the lunar deck Maybe P 

Wiljon Kar shook himself into ac- 
tivity. His commands lashed the other 
two into quick movement. 

“Mardico—get back to your freighter 
—you and Hals—~- We're trapped 
here—helpless—but wait—I’ll want 
that Venusite armor.” 


THE W62 was charging crazily with 
her lopsided load. Back at the controls 
of the X282 old Mardico sat tense, wait- 
ing, his eyes held fixedly to the visor 
plate. 

He caught the signal. 
had crawled to the very nose of the 


Wiljon Kar 


W62. Mardico blasted free, fired her 
torps and clenched his hands upon the 
controls. The freighter hovered in 
ominous pursuit just above the crippled 
W62. Hals clambered to the seat beside 
old Mardico. Together they watched 
the creeping movements of the master 
engineer as he slid over and around the 
long, slender hull. The reflections from 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


the Venusite plates about his space suit 
made him clearly visible. 

Time came to have no meaning. 
Their ears had become numbed from 
the steady whine of the ship’s beams. 
Old Mardico roused. He had dozed 
with his head in his arms. He glanced 
quickly toward Hals, breathed deeply 
with relief. The blond giant had seen 
him nodding and had silently taken over 
the controls. Mardico studied the re- 
flection of the visor plate, gasped. From 
the nose of the W62 below him a suc- 
cession of regularly timed blue flares 
were signaling some one. 

“Maybe ’tis Wiljon Kar,” Madico 
uttered in an awed whisper. “It is truly 
like him to. squeeze somehow into the 
ship and get to the flash marker’s sta- 
tion, there to signal Earthward for 
help.” 

Hals shook his head. “Not to Earth; 
she’s headed toward the planetoid belt 
and the flashes are shooting straight 
ahead. I’m not sure, but from what 
little I understand of the plottograph 
here, we’re all heading toward a small 
planet. And she can’t be far away 
either: 

“Look! Colossus! Hals, but cast 
your eye to that row of mushrooms 
yonder!” Mardico was on his feet. 
Eyes popped in horror as he stared won- 
deringly at the visor plate. 

A scant measure to the fore of the 
two speeding transports was a vast ring 
of strange pulpy-looking globules. Ar- 
ranged in a perfect circle, miles in di- 
ameter, they were turning slowly around 
a small, faintly luminous body at the 
hub of this grotesque wheel. 


“What shall we do? What shall we 
do?” old Mardico blubbered. “And 
Wiljon Kar is not here to command. 
Ah, woe indeed to us if anything has 
happened to Wiljon Kar. I tell you, 
brother Hals, were he with us ’twould 
be simplicity itself, for whatever in this 
universe the great Wiljon Kar does not 


A PRINCESS OF PALLIS 


know ’tis but little time it takes for him 
to find out.” 

Hals grunted. There was an expres- 
sion of fatalistic calm etched upon his 
broad features. “Hell’s fury, Mardico, 
why bellyache? We'll know soon 
enough ourselves.” 

But such philosophy was not for 
Mardico. With one hand he tugged 
fiercely upon the stiff strands of his 
beard; with the other he hammered a 
clenched fist upon the control panel as 
if to lash his bewildered brain into or- 
derly thought. 

“We've got it to do but what is it 
that we should do? If Wiljon Kar 
were here, he’d be in a flurry of doing 
things. Commands would fly: ‘Hals do 
this; Mardico—ah, what would his or- 
ders be for me—TI have it! I can hear 
him almost. Wiljon Kar would say: 
‘Mardico, to the gun port!’ By the fires 
of Aldebaran that is just what I shall do. 

“Listen, Hals—though ’tis Mardico 
who speaks, think only that ’tis Wiljon 
Kar who commands. Blast a curve so 
that we nose around and are heading 
straight down on the plane of yonder 
wheel. Sweep over and completely 
around the rim. And as you blast the 
ship old Mardico’ll spit the very breath 
of hell upon them with the X282’s guns. 
Quick now! To action!” 


Wiljon Kar toiled in frantic haste. It 
had taken him a good hour, possibly 
longer, to shunt arc finder points 29 to 
32. There remained but a minute gap 
to complete the shorting of these elec- 
trical devices. He braced himself care- 
fully lest the force of the shock knock 
him into space away from the flying 
transport. 

He took a last fleeting glance ahead. 
Whoever was in charge of the ship was 
making a desperate drive toward the tiny 
planetoid, Pallis. Already the little 
body stood out in the bleak heavens as 
big as an orange to the naked eye. Yet 


103 


it was that curious ring of grayish-yel- 
low globules slowly wheeling about Pal- 
lis which perplexed him. 

Wiljon Har grasped the steel wrench, 
braced himself, let it fall to complete 
the circuit. The W62 shuddered. For 
a second the wrench glowed red-hot. 
Wiljon Kar felt a tingling pulsation 
course over his body. Had it not been 
for the Venusite armor the shock would 
certainly have killed him. 

But the plan worked. Torp No. 12 
darkened. Swiftly the engineer blocked 
hands and knees with extra plates. 
There was no time to allow the torp 
muzzle to cool. Almost immediately he 
was worming his way up through the 
dark interior. 

B deck was dark. Wiljon Kar shed 
the Venusite armor, secured an oxykel- 
zite gun from the mechanics storage 
room. In close quarters this tool would 
serve most effectively as a weapon. But 
he must hurry! At the present speed of 
the W62 he had only an hour at the 
most. 


Wiljon Kar sighted the squat, scaly, 
brown body beyond the first turn of 
the ramp. A massive torso upon two 
stumps, four snakelike prehensile things 
for arms and deep-set, ruby-red eyes 
gleaming from the small, pointed head. 
The startled beast hissed in its surprise, 
turned to charge down the ramp. 
Swiftly, Wiljon Kar swung the jet of 
the torch, pressed the stud. Vivid flame 
tore its lightning course through the 
ugly brown thing. It slumped at the 
engineer’s feet. 

The peculiar groan of the ship was 
a wail of agony in Wiljon Kar’s ears. 
The W62 was screeching in frantic 
flight. The stench of hot oil was suf- 
focating. Speedily, yet with caution, he 
wound his way for nearly the length 
of the ship. Abruptly he stopped. 


THE SUDDEN SILENCE was op- 


pressive. The W62’s torps had been 


104 


shut off. Wiljon Kar hesitated before 
the last turn along the ramp. A quick 
pressure caused him to topple forward 
against the wall. The 2 was firing 
a frontal discharge in order to break her 
forward speed. Whoever was piloting 
the ship was burning the power through 
her with no concern. The transport was 
vibrating tensely from the severity of 
the breaking force. He held the torch 
in readiness, rounded the turn and 
swung up the ramp in an awkward, 
lurching trot. 

The flame burned its acrid streak of 
death before him. Two scaly bodies 
plunged from the doorway to the floor 
of the plot deck. Wiljon Kar released 
the stud. In one swift glance he ap- 
praised the situation. Chained help- 
lessly to the wall were Prock and Twom- 
bley. At the far end of the deck a 
strange man was hunched over the 
W62’s controls. At his back, a heat pis- 
tol in one hand and a coiled whip in 
the other, stood the mysterious girl. 
But even now she was whirling to face 
him, was leveling her pistol. 

There was no time for meditation. 
Wiljon Kar’s action was instinctive. 
The flame leaped from the jet, caught 
the man at the controls square between 
the shoulders. He crumpled forward 
without a groan. Yet.even as he had 
fired, Wiljon Kar dived into the room. 
The girl’s heat pistol seared the air 
above his hurtling body. Wiljon-Kar 
had dropped the flame jet. His charg- 
ing body drove across the room. Be- 
fore the girl could fire again, Wiljon 
Kar’s right arm encircled her, lifted her 
high in the air. 

It was less than three minutes though 
it seemed as many hours. Prock and 
Twombley were freed. The lanky me- 
chanic had a firm hold upon the strug- 
gling girl’s arm. 


“You won’t save your ship anyway,” 
she was screaming bitterly, “Look! al- 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


ready the King of Pallis has you in his 
clutch.” 

Wiljon Kar’s hands drove the con- 
trols with trained skill. He was blasting 
a desperate arc in an attempt to cut 
away from the encircling mass of sinis- 
ter energy. A quick glance at the ship’s 
visor plate drained the color from his 
face. Dead ahead loomed the tiny 
sphere of rock which was the planetoid 
Pallis. 

“The ship’s dead!” Prock was shout- 
ing. “We're too late. It’s those shells 
of energy that are whirling around the 
planet. That’s how they snared those 
cargo transports from Jupiter. They 
deaden a ship’s electrical charges—drag 
it down to the planetoid i 

Wiljon Kar was hammering at the 
lifeless controls. His lips were color- 
less lines in a white face. Prock was 
right. He was powerless to prevent the 
W62’s slow drop down upon the tiny 
rock which was Pallis. 

The hysterical laughter of the girl 
rasped upon taut nerves. 

“You killed them,” she was screech- 
ing. “Tondor and father were hiding 
in the lunar deck—we hid the scalies in 
the solar—you killed—killked-————” 

“Take her out!” Wiljon Kar was 
quavering. . “Lock her in one of the 
bunks. Do something—anything to get 
her out of here.” 

Stolidly, and with set features, Twom- 
bley lifted the girl to his shoulders. 

“They'll get you on Pallis,” the girl 
screamed frantically. “You'll suffer 
for this. You'll never get ™ 

The door clicked shut upon the nerve- 
racking screeches of the half-crazed girl. 

Visibly shaken, yet nerving himself 
splendidly, Prock walked over to Wil- 
jon Kar, laid one arm across the younger 
man’s shoulders. 

“Somehow the marauders learned of 
the council’s plan to investigate the loss 
of cargo ships in this region. It was a 


A PRINCESS OF PALLIS 


clever plan of theirs to prevent our spoil- 
ing their little racket. And, Wiljon Kar 
—I fear it has worked.” 

The young master engineer made no 
comment. Tense fingers still held to the 
useless controls of the W62. Dully he 
studied the ugly picture in the visor 
plate. 

The grayish-yellow globes were 
clearly visible now. Centers of energy 
controlled by some maniac down there 
on Pallis. They were round and glossy 
and seemingly swelled with energy. The 
malefic pirate upon Pallis was using 
them to haul in the imprisoned trans- 
port. 

“In another ten minutes 

“Look! What’s that?” 

Both engineers stared at the visor 
plate in open-mouthed wonder. 

At the very top of the ring of energy 
globes, a fiery hornet of space was spit- 
ting hot destruction. One globe ex- 
ploded and then another. The attacker 


” 


was belching a steady beam of fire upon 


the ring. Globe after globe flared in 
vivid destruction, burst like flimsy bal- 
loons. 

“It’s—it’s Mardico!” Wiljon Kar 
uttered the words ‘in an awed whisper. 
Before their eyes the courageous and 
amazingly skillful old gunner was burn- 
ing the very life out of the ring of 
energy globes. 

“The controls!” Prock yelled. “See! 
the ship responds!” 

It was true. Mardico’s destruction of 
the globes had cut their vicious power. 
The W62’s torps leaped once more into 
action. Wiljon Kar gunned her-sharply. 
The hot breath of her fire-belching 
torps reached the barren rocks of Pallis 
even as W62 tore away at a tangent. 

The clock indicated that fifteen Earth 
hours had passed. Wiljon’: Kar looked 
up from his desk. Handed the slip of 
paper to Hals. 

“Here’s the message. 
Earth at once.” 


Flash it to 


103 


Hals read it, grinned, hastened to the 
flash marker’s deck. The W62 was 
speeding Earthward, yet before the 
space leaping transport, the blue flares 
spelled out a code to anxious observers 
back in Toronto. 

“W62 reporting. Gil Tradine, King 
of Pallis, on board as prisoner—also 
Sulla Tradine, his sister. Had operated 
a pirate station upon planetoid Pallis. 
Used ring of controlled magnetic 
energy to paralyze transports and plun- 
der them upon the planetoid. Three 
others of the Tradine followers casual- 
ties, also numerous Plutonian scalies, 
used by this pirate gang in their plun- 
dering activities. Detailed report is 
being prepared by Master Engineer 
Prock. All is well. Towing in the 
X282 which was used in this project. 
Signed, Wiljon Kar, M. E., The Flying 
Engineers.” 

“And a jolly communication that is 
and one to tickle the cockles of even 
such stone hearts as our councilmen 
have,” old Mardico chuckled. “But 
woe is me, Wiljon Kar. ’Tis once that 
I’ve blasted spaceward with never a 
thought for proper provisions. My 
weechie is gone—gone, I tell you—every 
blessed scrap.” 

“Let’s drink it off.” Mechanic 
Twombley was screwing at the cap of 
a stone of roulek. “By the sacred spots 
of Sol himself, let’s rejoice that the 
freighter X282 was at least amply sup- 
plied with roulek.” 

With a smile of weariness Wiljon 
Kar turned his attention to the controls 
of the W62. They were yet a long way 
from Earth. But ringing through his 
heavier thoughts came the lusty chant 
of old Mardico as the huge guardsman 
prepared to up-end a tankard of bit- 
ters. 

“To the fair prisoner, says I,” old 
Mardico sang out. “I drink to the 
Princess of Pallis—confound her soul!” 


The Planet of Doubt 


AMILTON HAMMOND 
started nervously as the voice 


of Cullen, the expedition’s 
chemist, sounded from his station aft. 
“I see something!” he called. 
Ham bent over the floor port, staring 
into the eternal green-gray fog that 
blankets Uranus. He glanced hastily 


mS 


“=, 


at the dial of the electric plumb; fifty- 
five feet, it said with an air of positive- 
ness, but that was a lie, for it had 
registered that same figure for a hun- 
dred and sixty miles of creeping 
descent. The fog itself reflected the 
beam. 

The barometer showed 86.2 cm. That 


el a 7 ‘ 


. = 
a 
4 V7 
te 


by Stanley G. Weinbaum 


‘ too was an unreliable guide, but better 


than the plumb, for the intrepid Young, 
four decades earlier in 2062, had noted 
an atmospheric pressure of 86 in his 
romantic dash from Titan to the cloudy 
planet’s southern pole. But the Gea 
was dropping now at the opposite pole, 
forty-five thousand miles from Young’s 


~ 


Me 
we 


A 
— 


“Something moved! Up! 
Up!” Pat screamed. 


landing, and no one knew what vast 
hollows or great peaks might render his 
figures utterly useless. 

“I see nothing,” Ham muttered. 

“Nor I,” said Patricia Hammond, his 
wife—or more officially, biologist of the 
Smithsonian’s Gea expedition. “Or— 
yes! Something moved!” She peered 


108 
closer. “Up! Up!” she screamed. 
“Put up!” 

Harbord was a good astrogator. He 
asked no questions, nor even took his 
glance from his controls. He simply 
slapped the throttle; the underjets 
roared in crescendo, and the upward 
thrust pressed all of them hard against 
the floor. 

Barely in time. A vast gray wave 
of water rushed smoothly below the 
port, so close that its crest was carved 
by the blast, and spray clouded the glass. 

“Whew!” whistled Ham. “That was 
close. Too-close. If we'd touched that 
it would have cracked our jets for sure. 
They’re white-hot.” 

“Ocean!” said Patricia disgustedly. 
“Young reported land.” 

“Yeah, forty-five thousand miles 
away. For all we know this sea is 
broader than the whole surface of the 
Earth.” 


She considered this, frowning. “Do 


you suppose,” she asked, “that this fog 


goes right to the surface everywhere?” 

“Young says so.” 

“But on Venus the clouds form only 
at the junction of the upper winds and 
the underwind.” 

“Yes, but Venus is closer to the Sun. 
The heat here is evenly distributed, be- 
cause the Sun accounts for practically 
none of it. Most of the surface heat 
seeps through from within, as it does 
on Saturn and Jupiter, only since 
Uranus is smaller, it’s also cooler.” 

“Tt’s cool enough to have a solid crust 
instead of being molten like the larger 
planets, but it’s considerably colder than 
the Venusian twilight zone.” 

“But,” she objected, “Titan is as cold 
as a dozen Nova Zemblas, yet it’s one 
perpetual hurricane.” 

He grinned. “Trying to trip me? It 
isn’t absolute temperature that causes 
wind—it’s differences in temperature 
between one place and another. Titan 
has one side warmed by Saturn, but 
here the warmth is even or practically 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


even, all around the planet, since it 
comes from within.” 


HE GLANCED suddenly at Har- 
bord. “What are we waiting for?” he 
asked. 

“For you,” grunted the astrogator. 
“You're in command now. I command 
until we sight the surface, and we've 
just done that.” 

“By golly, that’s right!” exclaimed 
Ham in a satisfied voice. On his last 
expedition, that to the night side of 
Venus, he had been technically under 
Patricia’s orders, and the reversal 
pleased him. “And now,” he said 
severely, “if the biologist will kindly step 
aside “ 

Patricia sniffed. 
us, I suppose. 
single idea.” 

“But I have.” He turned to Harbord. 
“Southeast,” he ordered, and the after- 
jets added their voices to the roar of 
the others. “Put up to thirty thousand 
meters,” he continued, “we might run 
into mountains.” s 

The Gea, named for the ancient god- 
dess of Earth who was wife to the god 
Uranus, plunged through the infinity of 
mist away from the planet’s pole. In 
one respect that pole is unique among 
the Sun’s family, for Uranus revolves, 
not like Jupiter or Saturn or Mars or 
the Earth, in the manner of a spinning 
top, but more with the motion of a roll- 
ing ball. Its poles are in the plane of 
its orbit, so that at one point its southern 
pole faces the Sun, while forty-two 
years later, halfway around the vast 
orbit, the opposite pole is Sunward. 

Four decades earlier Young had 
touched at the southern pole; it ‘would 
be another forty years before that pole 
again saw noon. 

“The trouble with women,” grumbled 
Harbord, “is that they ask too many 
questions.” 

Patricia spun on him. ‘“Schopen- 
hauer!” she hissed. “You ought to be 


“So you can pilot 
I’ll bet you haven’t a 


THE PLANET OF DOUBT 


grateful that Patrick Burlingame’s 
daughter is lending her aid to a Yankee 
expedition !” 

“Yeah? Why Schopenhauer ?” 

“He was a woman-hater, wasn’t he? 
Like you!” 

“Then he was a greater philosopher 
than I thought,” grunted Harbord. 

“Anyway,” she retorted acidly, “a 
couple of million dollars is a lot of 
money to pay for a square mile of foggy 
desert. You won't hog this planet the 
way you tried to hog Venus,” 

She was referring, of course, to the 
Council of Berne’s decision of 2059, that 
the simple fact of an explorer’s landing 
on a planet did not give his nation pos- 
session of the entire planet, but only of 
the portion actually explored. On fog- 
wrapped Uranus that portion would be 
small indeed. 


“Never mind,” put in Ham. “No 


other nation will argue if America claims 
the whole fog-ball, because no other na- 
tion has a base near enough to get here.” 


That was true. By virtue of its 
possession of Saturn’s only habitable 
moon, Titan, the United States was the 
only nation that could send an explora- 
tory rocket to Uranus. A direct flight 
from the Earth is out of the question, 
since the nearest approach to the two 
planets is 1,700,000,000 miles. The 
flight is made in two jumps; first to 
Titan, then to Uranus. 

But this condition limits the fre- 
quency of the visits enormously, for 
though Saturn and the Earth are in con- 
junction at intervals of a little over a 
year, Uranus and Saturn are in con- 
junction only once in about forty years. 
Only at these times is it possible to 
reach the vast, mysterious, fog-shrouded 
planet. 

So inconceivably remote is Uranus 
that the distance to its neighbor, Saturn, 
is actually greater than the total dis- 
tance from Saturn to Jupiter, from 
Jupiter to the asteroids, from these to 
Mars, and from Mars to the Earth. It 


109 


is a wild, alien, mystery-cloaked planet 
with only icy Neptune and Pluto be- 
tween it and the interstellar void. 

Patricia whirled on Ham, “You!” 
she snapped. “Southeast, eh! Why 
southeast? Just a guess, isn’t it? Truth- 
fully, isn’t it?” 

“Nope,” he grinned. “I have my 
reasons. I’m trying to save whatever 
time I can, because our stay here is 
limited if we don’t want to be marooned 
for forty years until the next con- 
junction.” 

“But why southeast?” 

“T’ll tell you. Did you ever look at 
a globe of the Earth, Pat? Then maybe 
you've noticed that all continents, all 
large islands, and all important pen- 
insulas are narrowed to points toward 
the south. In other words, the northern 
hemisphere is more favorable for land 
formation, and as a matter of fact, by 
far the greater part of the Earth’s land 
is north of the equator. 

“The Arctic Ocean is nearly sur- 
rounded by a ring of land, but the 
Antarctic’s wide open. And that same 
thing is true of Mars, assuming that 
the dark, swampy plains are old ocean 
beds, and also true of the frozen oceans 
on the night side of Venus. 

“So I assume that if all planets had a 
common origin, and all of them solidi- 
fied under the same conditions, Uranus 
must have the same sort of land dis- 
tribution. What Young found was the 
land that corresponds to our Antarctica ; 
what I’m looking for is the land that 
ought to surround this north polar sea.” 

“Ought to, but maybe doesn’t,” re- 
torted Pat. “Anyway, why southeast 
instead of due south?” 

“Because that direction describes a 
spiral and lessens the chance of our 
striking some strait or channel between 
lands. With a visibility of about fifty 
feet, it wouldn’t take a very wide 
channel to make us think we were over 
ocean. 

“Even your English Thames would 


110 


Took like the Pacific in this sort of fog, 
if we happened to come down more than 
half a hundred feet from either bank.” 

“And I suppose your American 
Mississippi would look like Noah’s 
flood,” said the girl, and fell to gazing 
at the gray waste of fog that swirled 
endlessly past the ports. 


II, 


SOMEWHAT LESS than an hour 
later the G@a was again descending gin- 
gerly and hesitantly. At 85. cm. of air 
pressure Ham had the rocket slowed 
almost to a complete stop, and there- 
after it dropped on the cushioning blast 
of the underjets at a speed of inches per 
minute. 

When the barometer read 85.8 cm., 
Cullen’s voice sounded from the stern, 
where the port. was less obscured by 
the jets themselves. “Something 
below!” he called. 7 

There was something. The fog 
seemed definitely darker, and features 
or markings of some sort were visible. 
As the ship settled slowly, Ham 
watched intently, and at last snapped 
out the order to land. The Gea 
dropped, with a faint jar, to a resting 
place on a bare, gray graveled plain 
domed with a hemisphere of mist that 
shut off vision as definitely as a wall. 

There was something wild and alien 
about the limited scene before them. As 
the blast died, all of them stared silently 
into the leaden-hued vapors, and Cullen 
came wordlessly in to join them. In 
the sudden silence that followed the cut- 
ting of the blast, the utter strangeness 
of the world outside was thrust upon 
them. 

Venus, where Pat had been born, was 
a queer enough world with its narrow 
habitable twilight zone, its life-teeming 
Hotlands, and its mysterious dark side, 
but it was twin sister to the Earth. 

Mars, the desert planet, with its great 
decadent civilization, was yet stranger, 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


but not utterly alien. Out on the moons 
of Jupiter were outlandish creatures of 
bizarre little worlds, and on cold Titan, 
that circled Saturn, were fantastic beings 
born to that wild and frigid satellite. 

But Uranus was a major planet, no 
more than half-brother to the little inner 
worlds, and less than cousin to the tiny 
satellites. It was mysterious, unrelated, 
alien; no one had ever set foot on a 
major planet save the daring Young and 
his men forty years before. 

He had explored, out of all the mil- 
lions of square miles of surface, just 
one square kilometer forty-five thousand 
miles away from where they stood. All 
the rest was mystery, and the thought 
was enough to subdue even the irre- 
pressible Patricia. 

But not for long. “Well,” she ob- 
served finally, “it looks just like London 
to me. Same sort of weather we had 
last time we were there. I think I'll 
step outside and look for Piccadilly.” 

“You won’t go out yet,” snapped 
Ham. “I want an atmospheric test 
first.” 

“For what? Young and his men 
breathed this air. I suppose you’re going 
to say that that was forty-five thousand 
miles away, but even a biologist knows 
that the law of the diffusion of gases 
would keep a planet from having one 
sort of air at one pole and another at 
the opposite. If the air was safe there, 
it is here.” 

“Yeah?” asked Ham. “Diffusion’s 
all right, but did it ever occur to you that 
this fog-ball gets most of its heat from 
inside? That means high volcanic 
activity, and it might mean an eruption 
of poisonous gases somewhere near here. 
I’m having Cullen make a test.” 

Patricia subsided, watching the silent 
and efficient Cullen as he drew a sample 
of Uranian air into an ampule. After a 
moment she flexed her knees and asked, 
“Why is the gravitation so weak here? 
Uranus is fifty-four times as large as 
the Earth and fifteen times as massive, 


THE PLANET OF DOUBT 


yet I don’t feel any heavier here than 
at home.” Home to Pat, of course, was 
the little frontier town of Venoble, in 
the Venusian Cool Country. 

“That’s the answer,” said Ham. 
“Fifty-four times the size of the Earth 
or Venus, but oualy fifteen times as 
heavy. That means its density is much 
smaller—to be exact, .27. Figures out 
to about nine-tenths the surface gravi- 
tation of the Earth, but it feels to me 
almost equal. We'll check a kilogram 
weight on the spring balance after a 
while and get an accurate figure on its 
mass.” 

Cullen spoke up. “Oxygen twenty- 
two per cent,” he announced. “The rest 
is mostly nitrogen and argon. The 
argon’s what causes this ghostly green 
color; it’s in the state of the Pliicker 
tube red spectrum, and absorbes the red 
light.” 

“Safe to breathe ?” 

“Perfectly. Argon’s an inert gas, and 
a substance can’t possibly be poisonous 
unless it can react chemically in the 
body.” 

Pat sniffed. “See? It was safe all 
the time. I’m going outside.” 

“You'll wait for me,” he growled. 
“Every time I’ve indulged that reckless 
disposition of yours you’ve got into 
trouble.” He checked the thermometer 
beyond the port ; nine degrees centigrade 
—the temperature of late autumn back 
home. “There’s the cause of this per- 
petual fog,” he observed. “The surface 
is always warmer than the air.” 


PAT WAS already pulling a jacket 


over her shoulders. Ham followed suit, 
and fell to twisting the handle of the air 
lock. There was a subdued hissing as 
the slightly denser Uranian air forced 
its way in, and he turned to speak to 
Harbord, who was lighting a pipe with 
great satisfaction—an indulgence strictly 
forbidden in space, but harmless now 
that an air supply was assured. 

“Keep an eye on us, will you?’ Ham 


111 


said. “Watch us through the port, just 
in case something happens and we need 
help.” 

“We?” grunted Harbord. 
wife’s out of sight already.” 

With a muttered imprecation, Ham 
spun around. It was true. The outer 
door of the air lock was open, and a 
lazy wisp of fog drifted in, scarcely 
moving in the utterly stagnant Uranian 
air. 

“The crazy little Here! Give 
me that!” He seized a belt with twin 
holsters, holding a standard automatic 
as well as a terribly destructive flame 
pistol. He whipped it around him, 
seized another bundle, and plunged into 
the eternal mists of Uranus. 

It was exactly as if he stood under 
an inverted bowl of dull silver. A weird, 
greenish, half twilight filtered down, but 
his whole world consisted of the metal 
ship at his back and a fifty-foot semi- 
circle before him. And Pat—Pat was 
nowhere visible. 

He shouted her name. “Pat!’ The 
sound, muffled by the cold dampness of 
the fog, sounded queerly soft to his ears. 
He bellowed again at the top of his 
voice, and then swore violently from 
sheer relief as a thin, hushed reply 
drifted back out of the grayness. 

In a moment she appeared, swinging 
a zigzag, ropy, greenish-gray organism. 

“Look!” she called triumphantly. 
“Here’s the first specimen of Uranian 
plant life. Loosely organized, repro- 
duces by partition, and—what the devil 
is the matter?” 

“Matter! Don’t you know you might 
have been lost? How did you expect to 
get back here?” 

“Compass,” she retorted coolly. 

“How do you know it works? We 
may be right on the magnetic pole, if 
Uranus has one.” 

She glanced at her wrist. “Come to 
think of it, it doesn’t work. The needle’s 
swinging free.” 


“Your 


112 


“Yes, and you went out unarmed be- 
sides. Of all fool tricks!” 

“Young reported no animal life, 
didn’t he? And—wait a minute. I 
know what you're going to say. ‘Forty- 
five thousand miles away!” 

He glared. “Hereafter,” he growled, 
“you're under orders. You don’t go 
out except in company, and roped to- 
gether.” He drew a length of heavy 
silken cord from his pocket, and snapped 
one end to her belt, and the other to 
his own. 

“Oh, don’t be so timid! 
a puppy on a leash.” 

“I have to be timid,” he responded 
grimly, “when I’m dealing with a reck- 
less, improvident, careless imp like you.” 

He disregarded her sniff of dis- 
approval, and set about unwrapping the 
bundle he had brought. He produced an 
American flag, and proceeded to dig a 
depression in the gravel, planted the 
staff in it and said formally, “I take 
possession of this land in the name of 
the United States of America.” 

“All fifty feet of it?” murmured 
Patricia, but softly, for, after all, despite 
her flippant manner, she was loyal to 
the country of her husband. She fell 
silent, and the two of them stared at 
the flag. 

It was a strange echo from a pleasant 
little planet nearly two billion miles 
away; it meant people and friends and 
civilization—things remote and almost 
unreal as they stood here on the soil 
of this vast, lonely, mysterious planet. 

Ham roused from his .thoughts. 
“So!” he said. “Now we'll have a look 
around.” 


I feel like 


YOUNG had indicated the technique 
of exploration on this world where the 
explorer faced difficulties all but in- 
surmountable. 

Ham snapped the end of a fine steel 
wire to a catch beside the air lock. On 
a spool at his waist was a thousand foot 
length of it, to serve as an infallible 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


guide back through the obscurity—the 
only practical means in a region where 
sound was muffled and even radio waves 
were shielded almost as completely as 
by a grounded metal dome. The wire 
played the part not only of guide but 
of messenger, since a tug on it rang a 
bell within the rocket. 

Ham waved at Harbord, visibly puff- 
ing his pipe behind the port, and they’set 
out. To the limit of their permitted 
time, Uranus would have to be explored 
in thousand-foot circles, moving the 
rocket each time the details of the area 
were recorded. A colossal task. It was 
likely, he remarked to Pat, that the vast 
planet would never be completely ex- 
plored, especially with the forty-year 
interval that must pass between visits. 

“And especially,” she amended, “if 
they send timorous little better-be-safe- 
than-sorry explorers like you.” 

“At least,” he retorted, “I expect to 
return to tell what I’ve explored, even 
if it’s only a myriare, like Young’s 
achievement.” 

“But don’t you see,” she rejoined im- 
patiently, “that wherever we go, just 
beyond our vision there may be some- 
thing marvelous? _We take little thou- 
sand-foot samples of the country, and 
each time we might be just missing 
something that may be the whole signi- 
ficance of this planet. What we’re doing 
is like marking off a few hundred-foot 
circles on the Earth; how much chance 
is there of finding part of a city, or a 
house, o1 even a human being in our 
circle?” 

“Perfectly true, Pat, but what can 
we do about it ?” 

“We could at least sacrifice a few pre- 
cautions and cover a little more terri- 
tory.” 

“But we won't. 
about your safety.” 

“Oh!” she said irritably, turning 
away. “You’re——” Her words were 
muffled as she ranged out to the full 
length of the silken cord that bound her 

AST-—7 


I happen to care 


THE PLANET OF DOUBT 


to him. She was completely invisible, 
but occasional jerks and tugs as they 
tried to move at cross-purposes were 
evidence enough that they were still 
joined. 

Ham walked slowly forward, examin- 
ing the pebbled, lifeless terrain where 
now and then a pool of condensed 
moisture showed dull, and very occa- 
sionally, he came upon one of the zigzag 
weeds like the one Pat had dropped near 
the rocket. Apparently rain was un- 
known on windless Uranus, and the 
surface moisture followed an endless 
cycle of condensation in the cool air 
and evaporation on the warm ground. 


Il. 


HAM came to a spot where boiling 
mud seemed to be welling up from 
below, and steamy plumes whirled up 
to lose themselves in the fog—evidence 
of the vast internal heat that warmed 
the planet. He stood staring at it, and 


suddenly a violent jerk on the cord 
nearly toppled him backward. 

He spun around. Patricia material- 
ized abruptly out of the fog, one hand 
clutching a ropy plant. She dropped 
it as she saw him, and suddenly she was 
clinging frantically to him. 

“Ham!” she gasped. “Let’s go back! 
I’m scared!” 

“Scared? Of what?” He knew her 
character; she was valiant to the point 
of recklessness against any danger she 
could understand, but let there be a hint 
of mystery in an occurrence, and her 
active imagination painted horrors be- 
yond her ability to face. 

“I don’t know!” she panted. 
saw things!” 

“Where?” 

“In the fog! Everywhere!” 


Ham disengaged his arms and 
dropped his hands to the butts of the 
weapons in his belt. “What sort of 
things?” he asked. 

AST—8 


| a | 


113 


“Horrible 
things !” 

He shook her gently. “Who’s timid 
now?” he asked, but kindly. The query 
had the effect he sought; she gripped 
herself and calmed. 

“I’m not frightened!’ she snapped. 
“T was startled. I saw ” She paled 
again. 

“Saw what?” 

“I don’t know. Shapes in the mist. 
Great moving things with faces. Gar- 
goyles—devils—nightmares!” She shud- 
dered, then calmed once more. 

“T was bending over a little pool out 
there, examining a biopod, and every- 
thing was quiet—sort of deadly quiet. 
And then a shadow passed in the pool 
—a reflection of something over me— 
and I looked up and saw nothing. But 
then I began to hear rustles and mur- 
murs and noises like muffled voices and 
I began to see the fog shapes—horrible 
shapes—all around me. And I 
screamed, and then realized you couldn’t 
hear a scream, so I jerked the rope. 
And then I guess I just closed my eyes 
and rushed through them to you.” She 
shivered against him. 

“All around you?” he asked sharply 
“Do you mean between you and me?” 

She nodded. “Everywhere.” 

Ham laughed shortly. “You've had 
a day dream, Pat. The rope isn’t long 
enough for anything to pass between 
us without coming so close to one of 
us that he could see it clearly, and I 
‘saw absolutely nothing—absolutely 
nothing.” 

“Well, I saw something,” she in- 
sisted, “and it wasn’t imaginary. Do 
you think I’m just a nervous child 
afraid of strange places? Why, I was 
born on an alien planet!” At his in- 
dulgent grin she flared in indignation. 
“All right! Let’s both of us stand here 
perfectly quiet; perhaps they'll come 
back again; then we'll see what you 
think of them.” 

He nodded agreement, and they stood 


things! Nightmarish 


114 


silently under the translucent dome of 
mist. There was nothing, nothing but 
a deep and endless grayness and an in- 
finite silence, but a silence not like any 
Ham had ever experienced in his life. 
For on Venus—even in the sultriest 
part of the Hotlands—there is always 
the rustle of teeming life, and the eter- 
nal moaning of the underwind, while on 
the Earth no day nor night is ever quite 
silent. 

There is always somewhere the sigh- 
ing of leaves or the rustle of grass or 
the murmur of water or the voices of 
insects, or even in the driest desert, the 
whisper of sand as it warms or cools. 
But not here; here was such utter still- 
ness that the girl’s breathing beside him 
was an actual relief; it was a silence 
utter enough to hear. 

He did hear it—or was it simply his 
own blood pulsing in his ears, A 
formless throbbing, an infinitely faint 
rustling, a vague whispering. He 
frowned in the concentration of listen- 


ing, and Patricia quivered against him. 


“There!” she hissed. “There!” 

He peered into the gray dimness. 
Nothing at all—or was there something? 
A shadow—but what here could cause 
a shadow, here in this sunless region of 
fog? A condensation of mist, that was 
all. But it moved; mist can’t move 
without the thrust of wind, and here 
there was no wind. 


HE STRAINED his eyes in an effort 
to pierce the obscurity. He saw—or he 
imagined it—a vast, looming figure, or a 
dozen figures. They were all around; 
one passed silently overhead, and num- 
berless others weaved and swayed just 
beyond the range of vision. There were 
murmurings and susurrations, sounds 
like breathing and whispering, patters 
and rustles. The fog shapes were 
weirdly unstable, looming from little 
patches of darkness into towering shad- 
ows, dissipating and forming like figures 
of smoke. 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


“Good Lord!” gasped Ham. “What 
can * 

He tried to focus his gaze on one in- 
dividual in the shadowy throng. It was 
difficult; they all seemed to shift, to 
merge, advance, recede, or simply ma- 
terialize and fade out. But one sur- 
prising phenomenon suddenly caught his 
attention, and for a moment stunned him 
into rigidity. He saw faces! 

Not exactly human faces. They were 
more such appearances as Patricia had 
described—the faces of gargoyles or 
devils, leering, grimacing, grinning in 
lunatic mirth or seeming to weep in 
mockery of sorrow. One couldn’t see 
them clearly enough for anything but 
fleeting impressions—so vague and in- 
stantaneous that they had the qualities 
of an illusion or dream. 

They must be illusions, he thought 
confusedly, if only because their con- 
formations, though not human, imitated 
the human. It was beyond the bounds 
of reason to suppose that Uranus har- 
bored a race of humans, or even human- 
like beings. 

Beside him Patricia 
“Let’s go back, Ham. 
back.” 

“Listen,” he said, “those things are 
illusory, at least in part.” 

“How do you know?” 

“Because they’re anthropomorphic. 
There can’t be any creatures here with 
nearly human faces. Our own minds 
are adding details that don’t exist, just 
as every time you see a cloud or a crack 
on the ceiling you try to make a face out 
of it. All we’re seeing is denser spots 
in the mist.” 

“T wish I thought you were sure of 
that,” she quavered. 

He wasn’t at all sure, but he re- 
affirmed it. “Of course I am. I'll tell 
you an easy way to prove it, too. We'll 
turn the infra-red camera on them, and 
that’ll bring out enough detail to judge 
by.” 
“I’d be afraid to look at the plates,” 


whimpered, 
Please let’s go 


THE PLANET OF DOUBT 


said the girl, shivering as she peered 
apprehensively at the vague horrors in 
the fog. ‘“Suppose—suppose they do 
show those faces. What will you say 
then ?” 

“T’ll say that it’s a queer and unex- 
pected coincidence that Uranian life—if 
they are forms of life—has developed 
along somewhat the same lines as ter- 
restrial—at least in outward form.” 

“And you'll be wrong,” she mur- 
mured. “A thing like this is beyond 
coincidence.” She trembled against him. 
“Do you know what I think? Ham, do 
you suppose it’s possible that science has 
gone all wrong, and that Uranus is Hell? 
And that those are the damned ?” 

He laughed, but even his laugh 
sounded hollow, muffled by the smother- 
ing fog. “That’s the maddest idea that 
even your wild imagination has ever 
produced, Pat. I tell you they’re Ba 

A scream from the girl interrupted 
him. They had been standing huddled 
together, staring at divergent angles 
into the dome of mist, and he spun 
around instantly now to gaze in the 
direction she faced. 

For a moment his vision was blinded 
by the shift, and he blinked frantically 
in an effort to focus his eyes. Then he 
saw what had startled her. It was a 
vast, dusky shadow that seemed to orig- 
inate somewhere near the surface, but 
was springing upward and curving over 
them as if it actually climbed a veritable 
dome of mist, like a dim river of dark- 
ness flowing upward. 

Despite his derision of Patricia’s fear- 
born imaginings, his nerves were taut. 
It was a purely automatic gesture that 
brought his weapon to his hand, and 
it was pure impulse that sent a bullet 
flaming into the mist. There was a 
curiously muffled report from the shot 
—a single dull echo—and then utter 
silence. 

Utter silence. The rustles and mur- 
murings were gone—and so were the 
fog shapes. Blinking into the mist, they 


115 


saw only the sullen grayness of the 
eternal cloud itself, and they heard no 
sound but their own tense breathing and 
the faint after-ring of their eardrums 
from the concussion. 

“They’re gone!” the girl gasped. 

“Sure. Just what I said. Illusions 

“Illusions don’t run away from gun- 
shots,” retorted Patricia, her courage 
revived instantly with the vanishing of 
the fog shapes. “They’re real. I’m not 
nearly as afraid of real things as of 
—well, of things I can’t understand.” 

“Do you understand these ” he re- 
joined? “And as for illusions not run- 
ning away from gunshots, I say they 
might. Suppose these appearances were 
due to a sort of self-hypnosis, or even 
merely to the eye strain of staring 
through this fog. Don’t you think a 
shot would startle us out of the proper 
mental state, so that we’d no longer 
see them?” 

“Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “Any- 
way, I’m not scared any more. What- 
ever they are, I guess they’re harmless.” 

She turned her attention to the puddle 
of hot mud before them, in which a few 
curious feathery growths swayed to the 
bubbling of the surface. “Crypto- 
gamoid,” she said, stooping over them. 
“Probably the only sort of plant that 
can exist on Uranus, since there’s no 
sign of bees, or other pollen carriers.” 

Ham grunted, peering into the dismal 
gray mist. Suddenly both of them were 
startled into sudden alertness by the 
sound of the bell on the drum that held 
the guide wire. One ring; a warning 
from the Gea! 


PAT sprang erect. Ham tugged the 
wire in instant reply, and muttered, 


“We'd better go back. Harbord and 
Cullen must have seen something. It’s 
probably the same sort of things we 
saw, but we’d better go back.” 

They began to retrace their steps, the 
thousand feet of wire humming softly 
as it wound back on the spring drum 


116 


at Ham’s waist. Other than éhat and 
‘the crunch of their steps on the gravel, 
there was silence, and the fog was 
merely a featureless dome of faintly 
greenish grayness. They had progressed 
perhaps two hundred yards when it 
changed. 

Patricia saw the fog shapes first. 
“They’re back!’”’ she hissed in his ear, 
with no sound of fear in her voice now. 


IV. 


HE SAW them too. Now they were 
no longer surrounding the two of them, 
but were rushing past from the direction 
of the Gea in two parallel streams, or 
perhaps dividing into two streams just 
beyond the point of visibility. He and 


Pat were moving down an alley walled 
by a continuous double line of rushing 
shadows. 

They huddled closer to each other 
and bored on through the fog. They 
were no more than a hundred and fifty 


feet from the rocket now. And then, 
with a suddenness that brought them to 
a sharp halt, something more solid than 
fog, more solid than fog shapes, loomed 
darkly straight before them. 

It—whatever it was—was approach- 
ing. It was visible now as a dark circle 
at the level of the ground, perhaps six 
feet in diameter, upright and broadside 
on. It was moving as fast as a man 
walks, and it materialized rapidly into a 
distinct solidity. 

Ham and Pat stared fascinated. .The 
thing was featureless—just a dull black 
circle and a tubular body that stretched 
off into the fog. Or not quite feature- 
less. Now they could perceive an organ 
that projected from the center of the 
circle—a loose, quivering member like 
a large pancake on a finger-thick stem, 
whose edges quivered and cupped to- 
ward them, as if to catch sounds or 
scent. The creature was blind. 

Yet it possessed some sense that could 
register distant objects. Thirty feet 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


from them the stalked disc cupped 
deeply in their direction, the creature 
swerved slightly, and rushed silently to 
ward the pair! 

Ham was ready. His automatic 
roared its muffled blast, and roared 
again. The attacker seemed to telescope 
in upon itself and rolled aside, and be- 
hind it appeared a creature identical in 
all respects—the same featureless black 
circle, the same quivering disc. But 
a high, piercing whine of pain slipped 
like a sharp knife through the fog. 

This was a danger Patricia could un- 
derstand. There was no fear about 
her now; she had faced too many out- 
landish creatures on the Hotland fron- 
tiers of Venus, or in the mysterious 
wilds of the Mountains of Eternity. 

She snatched her companion’s flame 
pistol from its holster and stood with 
the weapon ready to vomit its single 
blast of destruction. She knew that it 
represented a last resort, not to be used 
until other means had failed, so she 
simply held it, and tugged on the wire 
to the Gga. Three pulls, and then again 
three, would summon aid from Cullen 
and Harbord. 

The second creature—or was it an 
other segment of the same animal?— 
came charging forward. Ham sent two 
more bullets into the blank, faceless 
front of it, and again that keening note 
of pain sounded. The monster swerved 
and collapsed, and another black circle 
was rushing toward them. His shot 
failed to drop this one, but the creature 
veered. 

Suddenly the thing was roaring past 
them, black and huge as a railroad train 
It was a segmented being; it was com 
posed of dozens of eight-foot iinks, like 
a train of miniature cars, three paifs 
of legs to a section. 

But it ran like a single creature, with 
ripples of motion flowing back along its 
countless legs in exactly the way a centh 
pede runs. Ham had a flashing glimpse 
of the manner in which the segments 


THE PLANET OF DOUBT 


As he sent the bullets crashing into the line of featureless, black creatures, 
a monster would swerve—collapse—another take its place—— 


were joined by finger-thick ropes of 
flesh. 

He sent three bullets into the middle 
of a passing section. It was a bad mis- 
take; the segment spouted black liquid 
and rolled out of line, but the one be- 
hind it suddenly turned its stalked mem- 
ber toward the two defenders and came 
rushing at them. And off in the fog 
the first section was circling back. They 
had two to face now instead of one. 

Ham had three cartridges left in the 


clip. He grimly fired one shot full at 
the quivering disc of flesh that cupped 
toward him, saw the monster collapse, 
and sent another bullet into the seg- 
ment that followed. The thing—or 
things—seemed to extend indefinitely 
into the fog. 

Beside him he heard the roar of the 
flame pistol. Pat had waited until the 
other monster was nearly upon her, so 
that her single blast might do as much 
damage as possible. 


118 


Ham stole time for a momentary 
glance at the result; the terrific dis- 
charge had simply incinerated a dozen 
segments, and one solitary survivor 
was crawling away into the fog. 

“Good girl!” he muttered and sent 
his last bullet into the onrushing mon- 
Strosity. It dropped, and behind it, 
driving inexorably on, came the fol- 
lower. He flung his empty weapon at 
the fleshy disc, saw it bound off the 
black skin, and waited, thrusting Pat 
behind him. 


THERE WAS a great, roaring light. 
A flame pistol! Dim in the fog were 
the figures of Harbord and Cullen, 
tracing their way along the wire, and 
before him were writhing segments of 
the blasted monster. 

What remained of the creature had 
had enough punishment, apparently, for 
it veered to the left and went thunder- 
ing away into the mist, now no more 
than ten segments long. And all around 
the group, just beyond visibility, the fog 
shapes gestured and grimaced and 
gibbered, and then they too vanished. 

Not a word was spoken as the four 
traced the wire to the door of the Gea. 
Once within, Patricia let out a low 
whistle of relief as she pulled off her 
dripping jacket. 

“Well!” she breathed. 
thrill.” 

“A thrill!” snorted Ham. “Say, you 
can have this whole soggy planet for all 
of me. And I’ve a mind to limit you to 
the ship, too. This is no place for a 
thoughtless imp like you; you draw 
trouble the way honey draws flies.” 

“As if I had anything to do with it!” 
she retorted. “All right; order me to 
stay aboard if you think it'll do any 
good.” 

He grunted and turned to Harbord. 
“Thanks,” he said. “That was close 
until you two showed up. And by the 
way, what was the warning for? The 
fog shapes?” 


“That was a 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


“Do you mean that Mardi Gras parade 
that’s been going by?” asked Harbord, 
“Or was it a spiritualist convention? 
No; we weren’t sure they were real. It 
was for the thing you did get tangled 
up with; it came humping by here in 
your direction.” 

“It or they?” corrected Ham. 

“Did you see more’n one of them?” 

“T made more than one of them. I 
cut it in half, and both halves went for 
us. Pat took care of one with the flame 
pistol, but all my bullets seemed to do 
was to knock off pieces.” He frowned. 
“Do you understand the thing, Pat?” 

“Better than you do,” she retorted 
sharply. His threat to restrain her to 
the ship still rankled. “This would be a 
fine expedition without a biologist, 
wouldn’t it?” 

“That’s the reason I’m being careful 
about you,” he grinned. “I’m afraid 
it would be without a biologist. But 
what’s your idea concerning that series 
of detachable worms out there?” 

“Just that. It’s a multiple animal, 
Did you ever hear of Henri Fabre?” 

“Not that I remember.” 

“Well, he was a great French natural- 
ist of about two centuries ago. Among 
other things, he studied some interesting 
little insects called processionary cater- 
pillars, who spin themselves a cozy nest 
of silk and march out of it every night 
to feed.” 

“Well?” 

“Just listen a moment,” said the girl. 
“They march out single file, every cater- 
pillar touching its head to the tail of 
the one preceding it. They’re blind, you 
see; so each one trusts the one ahead. 
The first one’s the leader; he picks the 
route, leads them to the proper tree, and 
there the column breaks up for feeding. 
And at sunrise, they form again into 
little columns, which join again into the 
big procession, and back they go to theit 
nest.” 

“T still don’t see 

“You will. Now, whichever cater 


” 


THE PLANET OF DOUBT 


pillar is in front is the leader. If you 
take a stick and break the column at 
any point, the one behind the gap be- 
comes leader for his followers, and leads 
them back to the cobweb nest just as 
efficiently as the original leader. And if 
you segregate any one caterpillar, he 
finds his own way, being leader and 
column in one.” 

“I begin to see,” muttered Ham. 

“Yes. That thing—or those things— 
are something like the processionary 
caterpillars. They’re blind ; in fact, eyes 
would have much less value on Uranus 
than on the Earth, and perhaps no 
Uranian creatures developed eyes—un- 
less the fog shapes possess them. But 
I think these creatures are a long way 
ahead of the processionaries, because the 
caterpillars establish their contact along 
a thread of silk, but these fellows, 
apparently, do it through actual nerve 

lia.” 

“Eh?” queried Ham. 

“Of course. Didn’t you notice how 
That flat organ in 


they were joined? 
front—each one had it slapped like a 
sucking disc against the one before him 
—was always placed in identically the 
same position. And when you shot one 
out of the middle of the file, I saw the 
pulpy lump it had covered on the one 


it followed. 
paused. 
“Besides what ?” 


And _ besides ” She 


“WELL, didn’t it strike you as 
Strange that the whole line codperated 
so well? Their legs mpved in a sort 
of rhythm, like the legs of a single 
creature, like the legs of a myriapod— 
a centipede. 

“I don’t think habit or training or 
discipline could ever account for the 
way that file of creatures acted, rushing 
and stopping and veering and circling, 
all in perfect unison. The whole line 
must have been under the direct neutral 
control of the leader—hearing and 
smelling what he heard and smelled, 


119 


even, perhaps, responding to his desires, 
hating with him and finally fearing with 
him!” 

“Damned if I don’t think you're 
right!” exclaimed Ham. “The whole 
bunch of them acted like one animal !” 

“Until you carelessly created two by 
breaking the line,” corrected the girl. 
“You see a 

“I made another leader!” finished 
Ham excitedly. “The one behind the 
break in the file became a second leader, 
able to act independently.” He frowned. 
“Say, do you suppose those things 
accumulate their intelligences when they 
join? Does each one add his reasoning 
power—if any—to the dominating brain 
of the leader?” 

“I doubt it,” said the girl. “If that 
were true, they would be able to build 
up a colossal intellect just by adding 
more sections. No matter how stupid 
each individual might be, they’d only 
have to click together enough of them 
to create a godlike intelligence. 

“If anything like that existed here, or 
ever had existed, they wouldn’t be rush- 
ing around weaponless and savage. 
There’d be some sort of civilization, 
wouldn’t there? But,” she added, “they 
might pool their experience. The leader 
might have all the individual memories 
at his disposal, which wouldn’t add a 
darn thing to his reasoning powers.” 

“Sounds plausible,” agreed Ham. 
“Now as to the fog shapes. Have you 
figured out anything about them?” 

She shuddered. “Not much,” she 
confessed. “I think there’s a relation- 
ship between them and these others, 
though.” 

“Why ?” 

“Because they came streaming by us 
just before the attack. They might have 
been simply running away from the mul- 
tiple creature, but in that case they ought 
to have scattered. They didn’t; they 
came rushing by in two distinct streams, 
and not only that, but all during the 
fight they were flickering and shimmer- 


120 


ing in the background. Didn’t you notice 
that ?” 

“My attention was occupied,” replied 
Ham dryly. “But what about it?” 

“Well, did you ever hear of the indi- 
cator albirostris—the honey-guide ?” 

“It sounds vaguely familiar.” 

“Tt’s an African bird of the cuckoo 
family, and it guides human beings to 
the wild bee colonies. Then the man 
gets the honey and the bird gets the 
grubs.” She paused. “I think,” she 
concluded, “that the fog shapes played 
honey-guide to the others. I think they 
led the creatures to us either because 
your shot angered them, or because they 
wanted the leavings after the others 
were through with us, or because they’re 
just plain destructive. Anyway, that’s 
my guess.” 

“Tf they’re real,” added Ham. “We'll 
have to turn the infra-red camera on 
the next group or herd or swarm or 
flock, or whatever you call their gather- 
ings. I still think they’re mostly 
illusory.” 

She shuddered. “I 
right,” she murmured. 

“Bah!” said Harbord suddenly. 
“Women don’t belong in places like this. 
Too timid.” 

“Yeah?” retorted Ham, now fully 
prepared to defend Patricia. “She was 
cool enough to notice details during that 
fracas out there.” 

“But afraid of shadows!” grumbled 
Harbord. 


hope you're 


V. 


HOWEVER, they weren’t shadows. 
Some hours later Cullen reported that 
the fog around the Gea was full of 


shifting, skittering shapes, and he 
trundled the long-wave camera from 
port to port. 

Handicapped by the argon-laden air 
with its absorption spectrum that filtered 
out long rays, the infra-red plates were 
nevertheless more sensitive than the 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


human eye, though perhaps less respon- 
sive to detail. But a photographic plate 
is not amenable to suggestion; it never 
colors what it sees by the tint of past 
experience; it records coldly and un- 
emotionally the exact pattern of the light 
rays that strike it. 

When Cullen was ready to develop 
his plates, Patricia was still asleep, tired 
out by the hectic first day on the planet, 
but Ham came out drowsily to watch 
the results. 

These might have been less than she 
feared, but they were more than Ham 
expected. He squinted through a nega- 
tive toward the light, then took a sheaf 
of prints from Cullen, frowning down 
at them. 

“Humph!” he muttered. The prints 
showed something, beyond doubt, but 
something not much more definite than 
the unaided eye. Indubitably the fog 
shapes were real, but it was equally 
certain that they weren’t anthropomor- 
phic. 

The demoniac faces, the leering 
visages, the sardonic countenances, were 
decidedly absent to the eye of the 
camera; to that extent the beings they 
had seen were illusions, whose features 
had been superimposed by their own 
minds on the shadows in the fog. But 
only to that extent, for behind the illu- 
sion lay something unmistakably real. 
Yet what physical forms could achieve 
that flickering and shifting and change 
of shape and size that they had 
observed ? 

“Don’t let Pat see thesé unless she 
asks to,” he said thoughtfully. “And I 
think I'll confine her to the ship for 
the present. Judging from the couple 
of acres we’ve seen so far, this place 
isn’t the friendliest sort of locality.” 

But he figured without the girl om 
both counts. When, fifteen hours later, 
he moved the rocket a mile south and 
prepared for another circuit in the fog, 
she met his order with a storm of pro- 
test. 


THE PLANET OF DOUBT 


“What's this expedition for?” she de- 
manded. “The most important thing 
on a planet is the life it supports, and 
that’s a biologist’s business, isn’t it?” 

She turned indignant eyes on Ham. 
“Why do you think the Institute chose 
me for this job? Just to sit idly in the 
rocket while a couple of incompetents 
look around—a chemist and an engineer 
who don’t know an epiphyte from a 
hemipteron ?” 

“Well, we could bring in specimens,” 
muttered Ham miserably. 

That brought a renewed storm. “Lis- 
ten to me!” she snapped. “If you want 
the truth, I’m not here because of you. 
You’re here because of me! They could 
have found a hundred engineers ana 
chemists and astrogators, but how many 
good extraterrestrial biologists? Darn 
few!” 

Ham had no ready reply, for it was 
quite true. Despite her youth, Patricia, 


born on Venus and educated in Paris, 
was admittedly preéminent in her field. 


Nor, in all fairness to the backers of the 
expedition, could he handicap her in her 
work. After all, not even the govern- 
‘ment-financed Smithsonian could afford 
to spend somewhat over two million dol- 
lars without getting fair return for its 
money. 

Sending a rocket out into the depths 
where Uranus plowed its lonely orbit 
was a project so expensive that in simple 
justice the expedition had to do its 
utmost, especially since forty long years 
would elapse before another opportunity 
to visit the doubtful planet. So he 
sighed and yielded. 

“That shows a faint glimmering of 
intelligence,” said Patricia. “Do you 
think I’m afraid of some animated links 
of sausages? I won’t make the mistake 
of cutting them in the middle. And as 
for those funny-faced shadows, you said 
yourself that they were illusions, and— 
by the way, where are the pictures you 
were going to take of them? Did they 
show anything ?” 


121 


Cullen hesitated, then at Ham’s re- 
signed nod, he passed her the sheaf of 
prints. At the first glance she frowned 
suddenly. 

“They’re real!” she said, and then 
bent over them with so intent an expres- 
sion that Ham wondered what she could 
read from so vague and shadowy a 
record. He saw, or fancied he saw, a 
queer gleam of satisfaction in her eyes, 
and felt a sensation of relief that at 
least she wasn’t upset by the discovery. 

“What d’you make of them?” he 
asked curiously. 

She smiled and made no answer. 


APPARENTLY Ham’s fears con- 
cerning Patricia were ill-founded on all 
counts. The days passed uneventfully ; 
Cullen analyzed and filed his samples, 
and took innumerable tests of the green- 
ish Uranian atmosphere; Ham checked 
and rechecked his standard weights, and 
in spare moments examined the reaction 
motor on which the Gea and their lives 
depended; and Patricia collected and 
classified her specimens without the least 
untoward incident. 

Harbord, of course, had nothing to 
do until the rocket plunged once more 
into the vastness of space, so he served 
as cook and general utility man—an easy 
enough task consisting largely of open- 
ing cans and disposing of the débris. 

Four times the Gea soared aloft, 
picked her way through the eternal mists 
to a new station, and settled down while 
Ham and Patricia explored another 
thousand-foot circle. And somewhere 
in the grayness above, forever invisible, 
Saturn swung into conjunction, passed 
the slower-moving Uranus, and began 
to recede. Time was growing short; 
every hour meant additional distance to 
cover on the return. 

On the fifth shift of position, Har- 
bord announced the limit of their stay. 
“Not more than fifty hours more,” he 
warned, “‘unless you have an inclination 
to spend the next forty years here.” 


122 


“Well, it’s not much worse than 
London,” observed Ham, pulling on his 
outdoor clothing. “Come on, Pat. This’ll 
be our last look at the pleasant Uranian 
landscape.” 

She followed him into the gray open, 
waiting while he clicked his guide wire 
to the rocket, and the silken rope to her 
belt. “I’d like to get one more look at 
our chain-gang friends,’’ she complained. 
“T have an idea, and I’d like to imvesti- 
gate it.” 

“And I hope you don’t,” he grunted. 
“One look was plenty for me.” 

The Gea disappeared in the eternal 
mist. Around them the fog shapes 
flickered and grimaced as they had done 
ever simce that first appearance, but 
neither of them paid any attention now. 
Familiarity had removed any trace of 
fear. 

This was a region of small stony 
hillocks, and Patricia ranged back and 
forth at the full length of the rope, 
culling, examining, discarding, or pre- 
serving the rare Uranian flora. Most 
of the time she was beyond sight or 
sound, but the cord that joined them 
gave evidence of her safety. 

Ham tugged impatiently. “Like lead- 
ing a puppy past a row of trees,” he 
growled as she appeared. ‘“‘Wire’s end!” 
he called. ‘We'll circle back.” 

“But there’s something beyond!” she 
cried. By virtue of the rope she could 
range an additional fifty feet into the 
obscurity. “There’s something growing 
just out of reach there—something new! 
I want to see it.” 

“Hell, you can’t. It’s out of reach 
and that’s that. We can lengthen the 
wire a little and come back for it.” 

“Oh, it’s just a few feet.” She 
turned away. “I'll release the rope, 
take a look, and come right back.” 

“You won't!” he roared. 
Come here!” 

He tugged mightily on the rope. A 
faint exclamation of disgust drifted out 
of the dimness, and then, suddenly, the 


“Pat! 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


rope came free in his hands. She had 
freed herself ! 

“Pat!” he bellowed. 
Come back, I say!” 

A smothered reply sounded, all but 
inaudible, Then there was utter silence. 

He shouted again. The all-enveloping 
fog muffled his voice in his own ears, 
He waited a moment, then repeated his 
call: Nothing; no sound but the rustle 
of the fog shapes. 

He was in a desperate quandary. 
After another pause he fired his revol- 
ver into the air, all ten shots at brief 
intervals. He waited, then fired another 
clip without response from the passive, 
leaden-hued fog. He swore bitterly at 
the girl’s foolhardiness, at his own help- 
lessness, and at the grimacing fog 
shapes. 

He had to do something. Go back to 
the Gea and set Harbord and Cullen 
searching That wasted precious time; 
every moment Patricia might be wan- 
dering blindly away. He muttered a 
phrase that might have been either an 
imprecation or a prayer, pulled a pencil’ 
and a piece of paper from his pocket, 
and scrawled a message: “Pat lost. 
Bring additional spool and attach to 
wire. Circle for me. Will try to stay 
within two-thousand-foot radius.” 

He clipped the paper to the wire’s 
end, weighted it with a stone, and then 
tugged three times to summon the two 
from the Gea. Then he deliberately 
released himself and plunged unguided 
into the fog. 


“Come back! 


HE NEVER KNEW how far or how 


_long he walked. The fog shapes gib- 


bered and mocked him, the condensation 
gathered on his face and dripped from 
his nose and chin, the fog pressed in 
about him. He shouted, he fired his 
automatic, he whistled, hoping that the 
shriller sounds might carry, he zigzagged 
back and forth across his route. Surely, 
he thought, Pat had sense enough not 
to wander. Surely a girl trained in the 


THE PLANET OF DOUBT 


Hotlands of Venus knew that the proper 
procedure when lost was to remain still, 
lest one stray still farther from safety. 

Ham himself was utterly lost now. 
He had no faintest conception of where 
the Gea lay, nor in what direction was 
the guiding wire. Now and again he 
thought he spied the silver filament of 
safety, but each time it was only the 
glint of water or the dull sparkle of 
stone. He moved under an inverted 
bowl of fog that blocked off vision on 
every hand. 

In the end it was the very weakness 
of the lost that saved him. After hours 
of hopeless plunging through the mist, 
he tripped—actually tripped—over the 
wire. He had circled. 

Cullen and Harbord loomed suddenly 
beside him, joined by a silken rope. He 
gasped, “Have you—have you 4 

“No,” said Harbord gloomily, his 
lined visage looking bleak and worn. 
“But we will. We will.” 


“Say,” said Cullen, “why don’t you 


go aboard and rest up? You look about 
done in, and we can carry on for you.” 

“No,” said Ham grimly. 

Harbord was unexpectedly gentle. 
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’s a sensi- 
ble sort. She’ll stay put until we find 
her. She can’t have wandered a full 
thousand feet beyond the wire’s end.” 

“Unless,” responded Ham miserably, 
“she was driven—or carried.” 

“We'll find her,” repeated Harbord. 

But ten hours later, after they had 
completely circled the Gea at a dozen 
different distances, it became obvious 
that Patricia was not within the circum- 
ference described by their two-thousand- 
foot wire. Fifty times during the in- 
tolerable circuit Ham had fought against 
the impulse to free himself of the wire, 
to probe just a little farther into the 
tantalizing fog. 

She might be sitting despondently 
just beyond sight and earshot, or she 
might be lying injured within an easy 
stone’s throw of the circle, and they’d 


123 


never know it. Yet to release himself 
from the one guide that marked their 
base was little better than suicide and 
somewhat more than sheer insanity. 
When they reached the stake that 
Cullen had driven to mark their start- 
ing point, Ham paused. “Back to the 
ship,” he ordered grimly. “We’ll move 
her four thousand feet in this direction 
and circle again. Pat can’t have wan- 
dered that far away. That'll give us 
nearly a mile from the point I lost her.” 


“We'll find her,” reiterated Harbord. 

But they didn’t find her. After a 
futile, exhausting search, Ham ordered 
the Gea to a point at which their wire- 
bound circle was tangent to the two 
circles already explored, and grimly 
began again. 

Thirty-one hours had passed since the 
girl had disappeared, and the three were 
nearing exhaustion. It was Cullen who 
yielded first, and groped his way wearily 
back to the ship. When the other two 
returned to move to a new base, they 
found him sleeping fully clothed beside 
a half-drained cup of coffee. 


VI. 


.THE HOURS dropped slowly into 
eternity. Saturn was pulling steadily 
ahead of the misty planet, bound placidly 
for their next meeting forty years in 
the future. Harbord said not a word 
concerning the passing of time; it was 
Ham who broached the subject. 

“Look here,” he said as the Gea 
slanted down to a new position. “Time’s 
short. I don’t want you two marooned 
here, and if we don’t find Pat in this 
area, I want you and Cullen to leave. 
Do you understand ?” 

“I understand English,” said Har- 
bord, “but not that sort.” 

“There’s no reason for you two to 
stay. I’m staying. I’ll take our portion 
of food and all the arms and ammuni- 
tion, and I'll stay.” 


~*~ 


124 


“Bah!” growled Harbord. ‘“What’s 
forty years?” He had turned sixty. 

“I’m ordering you to leave,” said 
Ham quietly. 

“You don’t command once we’re clear 
of the surface,” grunted the other. 
“We're staying. We'll find her.” 

But it began to seem utterly hopeless. 
Cullen awoke and joined them as they 
emerged into the infinite fog, and they 
took their places at six hundred and 
sixty foot intervals along the wire. Ham 
took the outermost position and they 
began their endless plodding through the 
mists. 

He was close to the breaking’ point. 
For forty hours he had neither slept nor 
eaten, save for a hurried gulp of coffee 
and a bite of chocolate when they moved 
the Gea. The fog shapes were begin- 
ning to take the weirdest conformations 
in his tired eyes, and they seemed to 
loom ever closer, and to grin more 
malevolently. 

So it was that he had to blink and 
squint and peer very closely when, a 
quarter way around the circuit, he saw 
something a little denser than the fog 
shapes in the gloom. 

He jerked the wire once to halt Har- 
bord and Cullen, and stared fixedly. 
There -was a sound, too—a faint, steady 
thrumming quite different from the 
eerie rustles of the fog shapes. He 
started sharply as he heard still another 
sound, indescribable, muffled, but cer- 
tainly a physical sound. He jerked the 
wire three times; that would summon 
his companions. 

They came, and he pointed out the 
dusky mass. “We can reach it,” he 
suggested, “if we tie a couple of our 
ropes together. Two should be plenty.” 

They moved cautiously into the mist. 
Something—something was _ stirring 
there. They crept quietly on, fifty feet, 
sixty. And suddenly Ham realized that 
he saw a chain of the multiple creatures 
—a vast chain, apparently, for it was 
still passing before them. In utter 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


~ 


despondency he stopped, staring hope 
lessly ahead; then, very slowly, he 
turned back toward the wire. 

A sound—a sharp sound—froze him, 
It sounded like a cough! 

He whirled back. Regardless of the 
dangerous file close before him, he 
shouted. “Pat!” Pat!” 

The sublimity of relief! A thin little 
voice quavered beyond the line. “Ham! 
Oh, Ham!” 

“Are you—are you safe?” 

“Y-yes.” 

He was at the very side of the passing 
file. Beyond, pale as the mist itself, 
was Patricia, no more than ten feet 
away. 

“Thank God!” he muttered. “Pat, 
when this chain passes, run straight 
here. Don’t move a single step aside 
—not a single step!” 

“Passes?” she quavered. “Oh, it 
won't pass! It isn’t a file. It’s a circle!” 

“A circle!” Comprehension dawned, 
“A circle! Then how—how can we get 
you out? We can’t break it or——” 
He paused. Now the queer parade was 
leaderless, helpless, but once it were 
broken at any point, it would turn into 
a fierce and bloodthirsty thing—and it 
might attack the girl. “Lord!” he 
gasped. ; 

Harbord and Cullen were beside him. 
“Here!” he snapped. He seized the te- 
maining rope. “I’m going across, 
Stand close.” 

He crawled to the shoulders of the 
two. From that height it might be-pos- 
sible to leap the creatures. It had to 
be possible. 

He made it, though it left Cullen and 
Harbord groaning from the thrust of 
his hundred and eighty pounds, Uranus 
weight. He spent only a moment hold- 
ing Patricia to him; the menace of those 
circling monsters was too imminent. 

He flung an end of the rope to the 
two beyond the circle. “Can you swing 
across if we hold it high enough, Pat?” 


THE PLANET OF DOUBT 


The girl seemed on the verge of ex- 
haustion. 

“Of course,” she murmured. 

He helped her lock elbows and knees 
around the rope. Slowly, painfully, she 
inched ker way in the manner of a 
South American tree sloth. Ham had 
one terrible instant of fear as she wav- 
ered directly over the file, but she made 
it, dropping weakly into Harbord’s arms 
beyond. 

Then she cried out, “Ham! 
you get across?” 

“Vault ’em!” he flashed. 

He spent no time in reflection. He 
gathered all the strength remaining in 
his body, drew back for a short run, and 
actually cleared the six-foot barrier of 
deadliness, his knuckles just touching a 
black, blubbery back. 

Patricia struggled to her feet, cling- 
ing tohim. He held her a moment, then 
said huskily, “Lord! If we hadn’t 
found you a 

“But you did!” she whispered. Sud- 
denly she began to laugh hysterically, 
the sound broken by choking coughs. 
“Only what kept you? I expected you 
sooner!’" She stared wildly at the 
circling file. “I short-circuited them!” 
she cried. “I—short-circuited—their 
brains !” 

She collapsed against him. Without 
a word he lifted her and followed Har- 
bord and Cullen back along the wire to 
the Gea. Behind him, revolving end- 
lessly, was the circle of doomed crea- 
tures. 


’ 


How can 


URANUS was a banded green globe 
behind the flare of the afterjets, and 
Saturn a brilliant blue star to the left 
of a tiny, very fierce sun. Patricia, her 
cough already improved in the condi- 
tioned air of the Gea, lay passively in 
a pivot chair and smiled at Ham. 

“You see,” she said, “after T cast off 
the rope—Wait! Don’t lecture me 
again about that!—I stepped just the 
merest few paces into the fog, and then, 


125 


after all, the plants I had seen turned 
out to be the same old zigzag ones I 
named Cryptogami Urani, so I started 
back and you were gone.” 

“Gone! I hadn’t moved.” 

“You were gone,” she repeated im- 
perturbably. “I walked a short distance, 
and then shouted, but the shouts just 
sort of muffled out. And then I heard 
a couple of shots in another direction, 
and started that way—and suddenly the 
chain gang came plunging out of the 
fog!” 

“What'd you do?” 

“What could I do? They were too 
close for me to draw my gun, so I ran. 
They’re fast, but so am I, and I kept 
ahead until I began to lose breath. Then 
I discovered that by sharp dodging I 
could keep away—they don’t turn very 
quickly—and I managed for a few 
minutes, although that blinding fog kept 
me in danger of tripping. And then I 
had an inspiration !” 

“You needed one!” he muttered. 

She ignored him. “Do you remember 
when I mentioned Fabre and his studies 
of the pine processionary caterpillars? 
Well, one of his experiments was to lead 
the procession around the edge of a big 
garden vase and close the circle! He 
did away with the leader, and do you 
know what happened?” 

“T can guess.” 

“You're right. 


Lacking leadership, 
the circle just kept revolving for hours, 
days, I don’t know how long, until at 
last some caterpillar dropped from ex- 
haustion, and a new leader was created 
by the gap. And suddenly that experi- 
ment occurred to me, and I set about 


duplicating it. I dodged back toward 
the rear end of my procession, with the 
front end following me!” 

“T see!” muttered Ham. 

“Yes. I intended to close the circle 
and dodge outside, but something went 
wrong. I caught up with the rear all 
right, but I was just about worn out, 
and I stumbled or something, and the 


next thing I remember was lying on the 
ground with the feet of the things 
pounding by my face. And I was in- 
side the circle!” 

“You probably fainted from ex- 
haustion.” 


“I never faint,” said Patricia with 


ty. 

“You did when I got you out.” 

“That,” she retorted, “was simply a 
case of going to sleep after about forty 
hours of staying awake without food. 
Fainting, or syncope, is quite different, 
being due to an undersupply of blood to 
the brain J 

“All right,” cut in Ham. “If fainting 
needs a brain, obviously you couldn’t 
faint. Go on.” 

“Well,” she resumed placidly, “there 
I was. I could have shot a break in the 
circle, of course, but that would have 
brougitt an attack, and besides, I hadn’t 
the least idea where the Gea was. So 
I sat there, and I sat a week or ten days 
or a month——-” 

“Forty hours.’ 

“And the fog shapes kept rustling 
over the file of sausage creatures, and 
they kept flickering and rustling and 
whispering until I thought I’d go mad. 
It was terrible—even knowing what they 
were, it was terrible!” 

“Knowing what—— Do you know 
what they are?” 

“I figured out one good guess. In 
fact, I had a suspicion as soon as I saw 
Cullen’s infra-red photographs.” 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


“Then what the devil are they?” 

“Well, you see I had a good chance 
to examine the chain things at close 
range, and they’re not perfect creatures.” 

“TTl say they’re not!” 

“T mean they’re not fully developed. 
In fact, they’re larve. And I think the 
fog shapes are what they grow up to be. 
That’s why the fog shapes led the things 
to us. Don’t you see? The chain crea- 
tures are their children. It’s like cater- 
pillar and moth!” 

“Well, that’s possible, of course, but 
what about the weird faces of the fog 
shapes, and their ability to change size?” 

“They don’t change size. See here— 
the light on that part of Uranus comes 
from directly overhead, doesn’t it? 
Well, any shadows are thrown straight 
down, then; that’s obvious. So what 
we saw—all that flickering, shifting 
crew of gargoyles—were just the shad- 
ows of floating things, flying things, pro- 
jected on the fog. That’s why the fog 
shapes grew and shrank and changed 
shape ; they were just shadows following 
some winged creature that moved up and 
down and around. Do you see ” 

“Tt sounds plausible. We'll report it 
that way, and in eighty years, when 
the north pole part of Uranus gets 
around to the Sunlight again, some- 
body can run up and check the theory. 
Maybe Harbord’ll pilot them. Eh, Har- 
bord? Think you’d be willing to visit 
the place again in eighty years?” 

“Not with a woman aboard,” grunted 
the astrogator.” 


Faceted Eyes! 


HE impact of X-rays upon the 

genes changes either the genes 

themselves or the pattern of 
their arrangement in such a way as to 
produce these mutations,” Dr. Miller 
explained to me as he led the way, 
through a maze of fruit fly cultures, 
electrical apparatus and miscellaneous 
biological equipment, to his untidy desk. 
We were in the huge genetics building 


by E. L. 
Ross 


shortly completed by Southwestern Uni- 
versity, primarily to house and do 
honor to Miller’s work in this field. 
“My early studies showed that Droso- 
phila could be made to change his 
characteristics along certain lines,” he 
continued, gesturing to photographs on 
the walls. “We could change his bris- 
tles, his body markings, and so on. All 
this work was just childish exploration.” 


128 


(It had won him a place as the ranking 
geneticist of North America!) “My 
recent work, which I shall publish next 
month, will revolutionize our ideas of 
heredity, of the role of genes and the 
cytoplasm, our prospects even of 
eugenic control of the human race!” 

“Look,” he continued, drawing me to 
a series of vastly enlarged photographs. 
“What would you say to a fruit fly with 
only four legs?” 

“But,” I expostulated, “it has always 
been thought that the phyletic structural 
characteristics were controlled through 
the cytoplasm, not through the genes!” 

“Exactly,” was the answer. “But I 
have succeeded in screening my radia- 
tions or modifying them in such a way 
—to be entirely frank, the physics of the 
thing is still not plain—as to change the 
obscure molecular or crystalline struc- 


ture in the cytoplasm and thus over-— 


turn the entire concept of cytoplasmic 
continuity !” 

The pictures were things of bizarre 
appeal. Almost one would have 
thought they were faked; at least, one 
familiar with the traditional ideas about 
the limits of radiation-induced muta- 
tions. Here was a fruit fly that clearly 
had only one eye, an enormous multi- 
faceted gem. Flanking it, another 
seemed to have overleaped the body seg- 
mentation so characteristic of the in- 
sects, having a one-piece body and legs 
jointed only at the hip and knee. 

“Here is a real beauty,” Miller inter- 
rupted my gazing. “I had a permanent 
exhibit made of it because of its unique 
mutation.” 

On the wall, protected by a sealed 
heavy glass case, was a delicate mount- 
ing of one of his specimens, fronted by 
a magnifying glass so that it was always 
on display. “Why,” I gasped, “it has 


the inner structure of a mammal.” It 
was obvious, even to a hasty inspection, 
that here was an insect possessing or- 
gans never associated with its class. The 
reproductive system was entirely alien 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


te that with which I was, in my. status 
as. an instructor in elementary biology, 
vaguely familiar. On the oher hand, it 
had no indication of assuming a verte- 
brate skeletal type. 

“This beauty”—Miller, a scientific 
zesthete, always referred to his best 
specimens as heauties—‘‘first set me on 
the track of my most radical experi- 
ments. I had found a critical range of 
frequencies within which cytoplasmic 
mutations generally occurred. Now, by 
systematically varying the temperature 
and length of radiation, I find that there 
is a set of optimum conditions at which 
every mutation follows the same general 
rule!” 

He paused, and I took my cue. 
“Yes,” with an attitude of expectation, 
“what was this general rule?” 

“Every mutation at these conditions 
was a change which could only be de- 
scribed by saying that the insect was 
trying to become human !” 

Naturally, I protested this. I ac 
cused Miller of letting his imagination 
run. away with him. I even gently in- 
sinuated that he should take a vacation, 
go up to his cabin on the Guadalupe 
River headwaters and take a long rest. 
He fumed and fretted, but finally 
seemed to make a difficult decision. 

“All right,” he said, “I’ll show you. 
I’ve been intending to destroy the thing, 
but if I keep an eye on you, I don't 
believe it can harm you, and then you 
will be a witness that it was actually 
alive. Otherwise, heaven knows what 
chicanery I’ll be accused of !” 


MOVING to. the stair door, he began 
to open it. I was surprised to see that 
it was fitted with a heavy four-letter 
combination lock and the door had beea 
reinforced with steel insets, although it 
was already a heavily paneled oak door. 
Without explanation, he led me down 
steel stairs to a basement room without 
windows. In a corner an iron-barred 


AST-8 


eB RES 


~ REE R 


/ 


cage contained what seemed to be a well- 
grown gorilla. 

“Why, Newt, I didn’t know you went 
in for keeping ” I began, when he 
shut me off abruptly. 

“Don’t look at the eyes! Understand? 
Don’t—look—at—the—eyes !” 

But this instruction was my undoing. 
I scarcely got an impression of the rest 
of the creature. For my gaze swung 
involuntarily to the eyes and could not 
leave them. They were great, glowing 
hemispheres, many-faceted after the 
fashion of insect’s eyes, but staring with 
an intense concentration that struck me 
like a physical blow. In those eyes I 
saw a giant brain striving for knowl- 
edge, and an organism struggling up 
from the abyss—the ceaseless quest of 
life for greater and greater complexity, 
the unending drive toward superiority, 
the vast, unread history of an evolution 
deeper and wider than our biologists had 
ever dreamed of—the pettiness of hu- 
man knowledge, and the futility of hu- 
man minds 

I was knocked to the floor by the 
impact of Miller’s charge as something 
like a heavy brown club whistled through 
the air at the level my head had occu- 
pied. “Thank Heaven I came to my 
senses in time,” he gasped. “If that— 
that—arm had struck you, you'd been 
brained !”” 

I could scarcely comprehend what had 
happened. Rapt in my concentration on 
the shining eyes of the beast, I had 
walked right up to the cage and, but 
for Miller’s timely assault (delayed be- 
cause he, too, had momentarily fallen 
under the spell until I walked into his 
line of vision) would have been brained 
by the monster within. My stomach 
squirmed at the thought of my narrow 
escape. We had, of course, scrambled 
back out of reach of the deadly swing- 
ing flails and carefully avoided looking 
into those menacing eyes. “Hypnotic 
mirrors,” I exclaimed _half-uncon- 
sciously. “They work just like the mirror 


AST—9 


FACETED EYES! 


12S 


devices used in some hypnotic experi- 
ments Hill has been doing in the 
psychology lab. But much more effec- 
tively—because of the infernal glow 
they have, I suppose!” 

Sobered and convinced by Miller’s 
demonstration of his weird mutation 
from a harmless fruit fly, I followed 
him back up the stairs to the main labo- 
ratory. Here a hasty conference 
quickly brought us to a decision to de- 
stroy the monstrosity at once. Miller 
explained that he had had a narrow es- 
cape once before—hence his precautions 
to keep the beast in, and others out— 
but that he believed the hypnotic effect 
much stronger than before; practice or 
mere growth. We might have stopped 
to debate the old problem of heredity vs. 
environment, but the situation called for 
action. I recalled my .45 automatic 
locked in a cabinet across the quad- 
rangle, and left to obtain it. Neither of 
us thought that this might be a hope- 
lessly inadequate weapon! 

Out of breath from my dash to South 
Hall and back—I’m not so young any 
more, I guess—I rushed into the labora- 
tory to come upon a scene of havoc and 
confusion. A huge X-ray apparatus 
had been smashed by blows as of a crow- 
bar. Elaborate glass structures, fine 
wiring grids and connections had been 
swept as by a huge broom from the ta- 
bles to the floor, and crushed. The lab 
was a scene of utter chaos. 

The door to the stair was open. A 
full-length window had been pushed out 
of its frame. 

My heart stopped in panic. I knew 
what had happened as if I had seen it. 
Miller must have gone downstairs while 
I was away! I dared not think further. 
The thing was loose. That incredible 
thing which must not live. It was too 
big to move fast—but 

Trusting that the monster had gone 
out the window, I dashed down the 
stairs to find what I knew was there. 
Newt’s body was literally smashed to a 


130 


pulp. By what ruse the beast had got- 
ten his attention, compelled him to open 
the combination lock on the cage door 
and thus escaped, I was never to know. 


THERE was no time for grief and 
less for speculation. Somewhere on the 
university campus a destructive machine 
of remarkable potentialities was on the 
loose. It was essential that I do some- 
thing to stop it, and to warn others. It 
took minutes—or so it seemed—to get 
police headquarters on the phone 

“Hello! Sergeant? Warn your men 
near the university that a dangerous ani- 
mal is loose. About the size of a gorilla. 
Tell them to shoot to kill!” I hung up, 
frantic to go out and exterminate the 
thing. By my failure to warn the po- 
lice of its eyes, I was the unwitting mur- 
derer of two brave men. I found their 


bodies as I raced about the campus ; each 
had died without firing a shot. 
Remembering its peculiar heredity, I 
sought in vain for a clue to its instinc- 
tive activities which might help me find 


it. Chance came to my aid. Running 
into a narrow, dimly lighted passageway 
between two buildings, I saw the mon- 
ster’s bulk just vanishing at the other 
end. Reckless, I dashed after, but rea- 
son came to my aid and I paused, look- 
ing round the corner before turning. 
The beast had its back to me, as it 
crouched behind a bank of shrubbery. 
Taking careful aim at the point which 
I thought would correspond to its heart 
—though realizing that this creature 
might be constructed on unheard of 
lines—I pressed down the trigger and 
held it. Then I saw that which brought 
terror to my soul—the heavy, steel- 
jacketed slugs, traveling a distance of 
less than twenty feet, glanced off the 
hard, chitinous armor as if from a bat- 
tleship. In utter despair I fled as the 
huge brute turned and lumbered slowly 
in my direction. Thank Heaven it had 
none of the speed of movement of most 
insects ! 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


Having distanced the thing, I stopped 
to look about in desperation. To my 
ears came the welcome siren of a squad 
car. I ran to the drive where they must 
enter the campus. There was a machine 
gun in the car and we decided to try 
this against the armor-plated enemy. 

It failed. By dint of carefully keep- 
ing my eyes on the ground and hitting 
one of the policemen a terrific blow 
on the cheek when he lapsed into the 
hynotized stare and started walking 
robotlike to death, I saved our forces 
without loss—but also without victory. 

The situation was becoming desper- 
ate. We considered hand grenades and 
high explosives, but left them as a last 
resort because of the buildings and deli- 
cate equipment of the university. 
Poison gas was discarded as too danger- 
ous and perhaps unsuccessful. We 
could not take time to experinient on 
Drosophila in search of an effective gas! 

Then I had another brilliant idea. 
“Sergeant Wilton,” I called to the head 
of the police squad, “sinee the eyes of 
this thing are its best weapon, can’t your , 
men stay at a suitable distance and shoot 
them out? Keep one man with his eyes 
averted by each man who is to shoot. 
Maybe this will work!” 

Did the hellish monster hear and un- 
derstand my words? Or did it add 
clairvoyance to its devilish hypnotic 
skill? Try as we would, we could not 
lure the beast into a position where the 
group could shoot at it. It had backed 
up into a kind of L-shaped court from 
which no escape was possible, but where 
we could not attack without incredible 
danger. 

We were at an impasse. Starving 
the brute out might take weeks, for its 
peculiar metabolism was unpredictable; 
and even though this was the summer 
vacation and the campus was relatively 
deserted, we could not take chances on 
having the thing escape again and per- 
haps reach the town. 

It was while I desperately reviewed 


FACETED EYES! 


all my memories of this hectic day, try- 
ing to hit upon the weak spot—the 
Achilles heel, of the monster—that the 
flash of insight came to me. “Its eyes 
are like hypnotic mirrors,” I had ex- 
claimed. Hypnosis—the control of one 
man’s behavior by another. Instantly I 
had formulated a new plan of attack. 

On the telephone I learned that 
Clark Hill, the country’s greatest expert 
on hypnosis and suggestion, was in his 
laboratory. To find him, explain the 
horrible situation, describe my plan, en- 
list his coOperation, was the work of 
minutes. If he had been skeptical, much 
time might have been lost—but he had 
seen some of Miller’s lesser marvels of 
mutation 

I insisted on being the subject, both 
because I was a first-rate pistol marks- 
man and also because I felt myself to 
blame for the deaths of two policemen 
already, and wanted no more blood on 
my own head. Hill, intrepid scientist, 
dared to go with me. It was necessary 
that he should, but I would not ask him. 
He insisted. 

Placing me in a comfortable position 
—if that is possible on the stone bench 
we used—Hill proceeded to hypnotize 
me. The method he used was simple 
direct suggestion, familiar to.all students 
of the science. The rest of the story I 
describe as it was related to me after- 
wards. 

“You have often shot at electric light 
bulbs for fun,” Hill stated to me when 
I was in the hypnotic trance. He knew 
this to be true. “Now I am going to 
show you two glowing bulbs and I want 
you to shoot them. You will shoot very 
calmly and carefully: You must not 
miss! You will remain absolutely under 
my control at all times. You can have 
no thoughts, make no movements, ex- 
cept those I permit you to make. 

“Your only thought is to be of shoot- 
ing out those light bulbs. You will 
think of nothing else, do nothing else.” 

Reloading my automatic, we crept 


131 


forward until we reached the corner of 
the L. Hill reémphasized his hypnotic 
instructions; we rounded the corner. 
Hill, despite my warnings, could not 
overcome his scientific curiosity. Spe- 
cialist in hypnosis, he wanted to see 
with his own eyes this weird freak of 
laboratory science collaborating with na- 
ture which possessed such supernatural 
powers. 

My gun halfway to a level, it paused. 
I had been instructed to shoot the light 
bulbs—but now something was between 
me and them. I could not see my tar- 
gets. One of the minor miracles of the 
day happened just then. Hill, walking 
the machinelike walk of the monster’s 
victims, found his progress blocked by 
a pile of ashes and rubbish which had 
just been shoveled from a basement 
window. Still facing the thing, he 
walked sidewise to avoid the obstruc- 
tion. 


At last I could see my targets. My 
gun, already in position, spoke rapidly. 


The bulbs, glowing brightly in the dim 
light, were extinguished. Hill suddenly 
reverted to normal consciousness within 
six feet of one of the most deadly mon- 
sters ever to walk the face of the earth 
—but a monster deprived of its most 


dangerous weapons. 
retreat. 

The thing, blinded now, huddled in a 
corner by the court. Like Samson, it 
was still too powerful for direct attack. 
A fifty-pound iron bar, dropped from 
the four-story building’s roof, pene- 
trated the armor, paralyzed the giant 
nervous system. A squad of policemen, 
augmented by ourselves and a couple of 
frightened janitors, improvised a bat- 
tering ram and applied the final stroke 
by breaking the huge neck. 

The remains were burned. Every one 
present was sworn ‘to secrecy, but 
rumors even more weird than the reality 
were circulated. But we denied them. 
It was the only thing to do. 


He beat a hasty 


Phantom Star 


by J. Harvey Haggard 


\ N TE LEFT the 14th Planet of 

Agena, of the constellation 

Beta Centauri, ascending 
above the frigid upheaval which lay ex- 
actly as it had reposed for countless 
centuries, preserved in the intense cold. 
Our sharp-prowed craft mounted up 
into space and headed out into the ebon, 
star-studded firmament, with the great 
star, Agena, lying ahead but slightly be- 
neath our keel. 

There were but two men in the space 
ship, breathing the air that was being 
constantly replenished within the cir- 
culating a€ropumps at the rear, treading 
the decks whose artificial gravity tugged 
snugly at our bodies. Each was occupied 
with diverse thoughts as we watched the 
velvet star field swing across the trans- 
parent glassite prow of the control room 
to waver uncertainly while we manipu- 
lated the propulsion instruments pre- 
paratory to establishing the determined 
trajectory of our flight. 

The space ship lurched unsteadily as 
I locked the repulsion motivators which 
would swing our craft like a stellar 
missile along a computed line of un- 
leashed gravitational forces. 

I locked the controls abruptly, swung 
aside from the pilot seat. On the upper 
slant of the pointed prow, the bulbous, 
transparent lens before the control room 
extended out into space, like the single 
eye of some monstrous fish. Leaving 
the control board, with its familiar array 
of mechanisms and dials, I paced a run- 
way hugging the left hull, pressed a 
spring release in the wall, and watched a 
tiny aperture slide back, revealing a 
small compartment, stocked with sealed, 
pyramidal bottles. 

“No use to bother the controls, Gregg! 
I’ve locked them on our course,” I said. 


Terrestrials had wondered at the 
association of Fran Gregori, whose 
radical scientific theories were being con- 
sidered by many of the greatest savants 
in the universe, with my own obscure 
person, who had intruded but slightly 
into the publicized fields of research. 

“What more appropriate than an 
Earthly vintage, as rare and delicious 
as this, brewed in the green vineyards 
of our own far-away world! Even 
here in distant space, we can do homage 
to the planet that begot us. Come, 
Gregori, let us celebrate my surmount- 
ing the unfathomable depths. of ignor- 
ance and restraint, with a sip of wine 
such as is made in but one tiny globe 
in the entire cosmos.” 

“Excellent, Marlin! Then you have 
succeeded?” queried Gregori eagerly, 
nor could he hide a furtive greed which 
I pretended not to notice. 

His gray blouse was open at the throat 
and rolled over bulging forearms. 
“You've succeeded again?” 

“T have,” I answered solemnly, “even 
beyond the extent of my cherished 
dreams. Ah! here in space we learn 
many of nature’s inexorable secrets 
which are excluded to you students who 
sit tight to your precious planets! Let 
us drink to it, we who have known each 
other so long, and to all those surround- 
ing infinitudes to which we must some 
day belong. Again I have won out. We 
shall drink with this wine; it is Amon- 
tillado!” 

He was leaning forward; now he 
thrust out a blue-veined hand, gaining 
support from a near-by railing which 
girdled the interior. His face was oddly 
chiseled; I despised and loathed each 
outline. The nose was too large, the 
chin curiously ridged. For all of his 


PHANTOM STAR 


Then came the crisis. 


reputed learning there was much I could 
show him about interplanetary space. 

“Amontillado?” he repeated. 

“Again I. quaff the-sweet nectar which 
is success, yet which may be transformed 
to the sourest acid,” I proclaimed, filling 
the glasses and handing him one. 

“Amontillado ?” 

“You recall the fable then?” 

“Amontillado !” 


\\ \\ 
AK 


*\\ 


PAA NA |)" 

j \ \ 
AON 
fi! 1) A 
The blazing light of the star 
became visible as gigantic flames, licking up greedily. 


THE SILENCE of the conning room 
was shattered by a splintering glass, 
which fell from a paralyzed hand. The 
wine splashed across the metallic floor, 
its color almost imperceptible. Gregori’s 
eyes were wide with astonishment. His 
pointed upper lip hung out, almost in 
mid-air. Ordinarily so expressive of 
selfish abandon, its taut outlines cap- 
tured some expression akin to horror. 


134 


“But Glennin told me, Marlin ms 

I cut him short. “Glennin was a fogl! 
He sits in his freighting station on the 
14th Planet and passes his time talking,” 
I said. “He believed what I told him. 
That is why you are here.” 

“Yes; that is why I came,” admitted 
Gregori, his face almost impassive. It 
was evident that he was attempting to 
control the first natural reactions accom- 
panying his astonishment. Yet I knew 
he was afraid. His hands were trem- 
bling. “It was a neat trick, by Heaven!” 

“TI expected you to be interested. The 
scientific world has lost its enthusiasm 
in your consecutive contributions, fol- 
lowing the ‘Kinetic Neutralization of 
Macrocosmic Space,’ which was the 
title of our first collaboration—if you 
can call it that,” I announced. 

“T tried, foolishly enough, to convince 
a few individuals, whom I thought 
would believe, of what transpired. They 
laughed at me, as was natural.” 

I was outwardly cool and collected. 
Never once through those years had I 
betrayed the deep resentment for all 
those injuries he had inflicted upon me. 
Smal] wonder that he had recalled so 
readily an old narrative of classic Eng- 
lish relative to a “cask of Amontillado,” 
wherein a man had lured an enemy into 
a dungeon, ostensibly to procure a rare 
bottle of wine, but secretly to entice him 
to a sealed death. 

The fictitious situation had been du- 
plicated with ludicrous precision here. 
Years before I had been elated at the 
sudden success of my pursuits in the 
study of static electricity and its rela- 
tion to the pent-up kinetic energy of the 
universe as a whole, which I had proved 
as capable of being harnessed to man’s 
needs. 

Victory had come with a burst of 
complete enlightenment. What that dis- 
covery represented would have been, to 
me, the ultimate achievement. During 
those bitter years of silence I had looked 
back with bitter retrospective upon that 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


occasion, long before, when I stood be- 
fore the threshold of a marvelous door 
which had never opened. I had trusted 
Fran Gregori, then. 

Gregori seemed dazed. 
his lips stupidly. 

“You intend to kill me, Marlin,” he 
said in shrilly unnatural tones. 

“We shall go together.” 

“Maybe I was wrong, Marlin. You 
realize, after all, that I am only human. 
I have never really understood you. You 
were so much like a machine—cold- 
blooded, implacable——” 

“Look behind you, Gregori.” 

“Good Lord!” 

He had turned. He was a large man; 
now he stood, half bent, his eyes search- 
ing outward. There was an ovoid out- 
line of interstellar space beyond the con- 
trols. Now the giant star, Agena, 
loomed in the center. It was larger than 
before. It took no second glance for him 
to realize that our craft was set head-on. 

With a tortured wail he leaped upon 
the controls, wrenching at the mecha- 
nisms. He stood dazed for some mo- 
ments, staring out at the impending 
doom which rushed upward with the 
inflating image of the great star. 

“Ha ha!” he laughed. “It is a joke. 
I'll admit you’ve scared me, Marlin, 
but we'll have to be getting back. After 
all, we’ve both a life to live.” 

“Mine vanished years ago.” 

The illumination from the onrushing 
star caught the gleaming gray across 
his temples. He seemed to age with 
each instant. Sweat glistened over his 
face in great beads. His hands slipped 
from the useless controls. 

“What is it you wish?” he asked in a 
tremulous voice. Not yet had fear over- 
come his insufferable pride to the ex- 
tent that he would cower before me. 
“We can come to terms. What is it 
worth to you? I did betray you, but 
I can repay now.” 

“Yes,” I said. “You can repay now.” 

He understood the portent of my 


He licked 


PHANTOM STAR 


words. Slowly his features were meta- 
morphosing into a mask of livid terror. 
He left the railing and came toward me 
slowly, half crouched. 

When he sprang across the metallic 
flooring, a wall of impregnable glass had 
leaped between us, protecting my body 
within a closed semicircle, though our 
voices were yet distinctly audible across 
the barrier. For long minutes he 


pounded at the glass, bruising his fists 
until they were mere masses of bleeding 
pulp. At last instinct for self-preserva- 
tion prevailed, and he cowered before 
me, blubbering incoherently for his life. 


WHEN he again faced the prow of 
the space vessel he cringed backward, 
half supported by the glass obstruction 
at his back. The star, Agena, occupied 
most of the visible space above the con- 
trol board, its illumination glaring lividly 
to each corner of the conning room, 
seeking out each bit of intricate appara- 
tus designed to aid in the comprehensive 
navigation of space. His breath came 
hoarsely. 

“T’ll make retribution!” he moaned. 
“In the name of Heaven, Marlin! I'll 
make retribution! I will bare the entire 
circumstances of my guilt. Anything 
you wish! You may make a record 
of it.” 

“A record is being made of every 
word you say,” I returned calmly. 

At that, with the intense glare of the 
nearing Sun full in his eyes, he lost 
all vestiges of sanity. He waved his 
arms and screamed aloud. Inevitably 
his gaze seemed held to the monstrous 
furnace which leaped to engulf us. 
Occasionally during those last few mo- 
ments he turned to plead with me, con- 
fessing deeds of which he and I alone 
were cognizant. 

Then came the crisis. The blazing 
light of the star became visible as 
gigantic flames, licking upward greedily. 
They curled up, caught at the exterior 
ef the space craft. I braced myself 


135 


solidly, gripping a wall stanchion with 
terrific pressure. For a single instant 
a stunning sensation smote through my 
every nerve. My body, immersed in 
some hellish sea of fire, swept through 
illimitable expanses of scintillating light. 

The space ship shuddered slightly, as 
if deviating a trifle from its path, but 
no concussion came. As suddenly as 
the brilliance had come, it was gone. 

The black field of space lay ahead. 
Even the tiny myriad stars were not 
visible, due to sudden visual contrast. 
Impenetrable darkness reigned until the 
muscles in our eyes gradually asserted 
themselves. The giant star was gone. 

“There is no cause for further alarm, 
Gregori,” I said, stepping from my pro- 
tective barrier. “You will not be 
harmed. I have what I want. The 
image we have just traversed was no 
true star. It is what is called a ‘ghost 
star.’ Existence of stars such as this 
was suspected long ago. 

The original star of Agena has burned 
out, and wandered away into space as a 
dark star.* 

“Agena is a ghost star. It is a phan- 
tom reassembly of light rays which de- 
parted into Einstein’s unbounded space 
millions of years ago. Our space ship 
merely intersected the convergence of a 
light image.” 

I stepped across his recumbent body 
toward the recording instruments which 
had registered the happenings of the 
past few moments. Again the bottle 
gurgled, and two more glasses were 
filled. Tilted before the glassite control 
window, the sparkling liquid caught 
roseate tints from the distant stars of 
space. 

“You are not a connoisseur of liquors, 
Gregori; that is eminently apparent, or 
you would have known that this wine— 
is not—Amontillado.” 

* Eddington estimates the time aceded to form 


a ‘ghost star’ as approximately 6600 million 
years.— (Expanding iverse.) 


~ 


‘The Way of the 


HEY brought in Lee Navarre 
after the Battle of Tayle in 


2637. It was a great victory 
for Anklo and for Alvaro, the dictatahr. 
No one knew that better than Alvaro 
himself. 

However, every one knew that even 
Anklo might have-been defeated had it 
not been for old Noklid, the scientist. 


He stayed behind the lines, out of harm’s 
way, and made weapons. He accom- 
plished much; probably, because he con- 
sidered war but an incident and nothing 
of importance. 

Had they stopped to think, the people 
might have called for him to make a 
speech after Alvaro had finished. But 
that would have done them no good, 


VN eI 


since Noklid was not even at the cele- 
bration. He had said that he did not 
care for speeches; in fact, he tid put 
it stronger than that. 

“Bah! People, speeches, foolishness ! 
Give me my laboratory!” And Alvaro 
said nothing, for Noklid was a person 
that not even the dictatahr cared to 
argue with, 


Above them were the space reptiles 
—calmly munching on the buildings! 


by David R. Daniels 


Besides, the scientist had Lee Navarre 
to occupy his attention. No one knew 
why the scientist wanted him; but as 
far as that goes, Alvaro was almost the 
only one who knew that Noklid had him. 

That the scientist had asked for Lee 
caused the dictatahr quite a lot of 
thought. Had any one besides Noklid 
asked for him, the request would never 


138 


have been granted; it is possible that 
the asker might not have lived to make 
another request. However, Noklid was 
Noklid, and greater in his way than any 
dictatahr. 

“When I promised to help you,” he 
had said, making his teeth click a little 
on the “you,” “I was in turn promised 
that I might have anything I chose be- 
neath the dictatahrship of Earth. I did 
my part, now I ask you todo yours. All 
] want is that since Lee Navarre has 
been captured alive that he be brought 
unharmed to my laboratory. Will you 
do as I ask?” 

Alvaro had demurred. “Who knows 
what you may contemplate His 
voice had trailed off as though what he 
thought were better left unsaid. 

“Do you think that I plan rebellion?” 
Noklid could be very much to the point 
when he chose. 

“No, no,” the dictatahr hastened to 
explain. “Yet as you know it has been 


the law of the planet for a hundred years 
that no living thing be killed other than 


humanely. Now it may be ee 

“Poppycock!” Noklid interrupted 
rudely. And since it is not the custom 
that dictatahrs be spoken to thus, Alvaro 
was so dumfounded that in the end 
Noklid won out. 

Lee was taken to the laboratory unin- 
jured save for a great lump on his head. 
That lump had been unavoidable, since 
after the fall of Tayle he had fought on 
alone, with ray gun and atomic blast, 
defying the world. 

Even after the charges of his gun 
were gone, Lee continued to defy them 
all. There was much of the god in his 
heroic form, and he had that in’ him 
which could sway multitudes. In war 
time men see and do many heroic deeds. 
All those who had fought Lee that day 
had envied him. Had he cared, it is 
possible that he might have called some 
of them to him. 

It was no wonder that so many had 
died for him. His was a great person- 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


ality, and also, he was considered the 
greatest inventor of the age. Not even 
Noklid could approach him in that. 
Doubtless the scientist had the greater 
brain, but he seldom considered such 
mundane things as the manufacture of 
arms. Seemingly that was all Lee ever 
did think of. 

But, that weapons were not the only 
thing he knew how to use he had shown 
the day he was captured. The guns he 
had made could not shoot on forever, 
but it appeared that he would not cease 
to defy them all. After his weapons 
were empty he clenched his great fists 
and called to the ships to.come and take 
him. He stood alone on the tower, his 
head bare, and laughed at the circling 
fliers. 

“Come on,” he had yelled as they 
dropped closer. Though each man 
longed for the honor of capturing him, 
they loved him. 


SINCE it was feared that he might 
leap to death over the side of the tower, 
half the fliers dropped a hundred feet, 
and, hovering in mid-air, stretched a 
great net which had been brought for 
just such an emergency. Had it not 
been for that Lee might have leaped 
so that the last laugh would be his; no 
one ever knew what the man contem- 
plated. 

He had glanced down and seen the net 
and laughed again, anyway. “Come 
on,” he repeated. “Don’t be afraid.” 
He knew there was no escape now, for 
already a ground force was coming up 
the inside of the tower. Very likely 
he gloried in the fact that it needed an 
army to take him. He had _ backed 
against a balustrade where he stood 
squarely on his two feet. 

They came, weaponless as he was, for 
they knew better than to harm him. 
They could only approach him from one 
direction because cf his position, and it 
was no easy capture since he towered a 
head above them all. The first he felled 


THE WAY OF THE EARTH 


with a blow to the jaw, and they ap- 
proached more warily. Finally they had 
rushed, hurling themselves upon him 
so quickly that his driving fists were 
clogged, till they bore him down by sheer 
weight. Yet he had fought on and on, 
like a cornered animal. 

At last, driven to desperation, some 
one hit him on the head with a piece of 
metal his groping fingers encountered. 
After that they bound him with chains 
and bore him back to Anklo, since he 
was unconscious and had nothing to 
say as to what they did with him. 

Now Lee stood in the laboratory, 
alone except for old Noklid. He was 
still chained, since otherwise no one 
could have done anything with him had 
he chosen to resist. His clothes were 
in tatters, but his air did not suggest the 
captured leader of rebellion. 

He was smiling as he had while he 
fought. While his features were good, 
he was not handsome, though he was 
magnificent. And it was noticeable that 
humor lurked always.in his intelligent 
eyes or on his countenance. He acted 
as though he considered mankind a 
curiosity, and a very funny one. 

Noklid peered at him through his 
spectacles. They were large and round 
and gave him an owllike expression. 

“Quite a specimen,” he murmured, 
“intelligent too, if one is to judge by the 
shape of the head.” 

The smile of the prisoner widened. 
“Am I a rat to be used in the interest 
of science?” he asked. “I can think of 
other and more polite things.” 

“Tut, tut,” Noklid said. “From the 
things I've heard said to me I have al- 
most reached the conclusion that I am 
poorly thought of.” Then he decided 
to explain : 

“Over in that corner, young man, is 
some of my apparatus. By your leave I 
will experiment with it on you. Other- 
wise—however, after you hear me I 
think you will be willing.” 

Lee’s gaze followed Noklid’s pointing 


139 


forefinger. “Then I am a rat,” he said. 
“That looks like some new type of 
atomic blast with its bell projection. But 
I may be mistaken; it hardly seems that 
you would go to all this trouble merely 
to kill me.” 

“Of course not. In fact, Lee Navarre 
—I believe that is your name—I am sur- 
prised that I went to all this trouble for 
any purpose. I spent much good time 
to obtain you for a subject, all merely 
to satisfy a whim. 

“That apparatus is what I call a mind 
director, which is only another way of 
saying that it is for the purpose of send- 
ing a man’s mind free of his body. But 
that is not my only object—I had 
thought to send your mind down into the 
earth.” 

Surprise wrinkled deep in Lee’s 
brows. “Send my mind into the earth 
—for what reason?” 


“For the sake of knowledge,” Noklid 
“Do you think I would do 
What do you suppose 


snapped. 
it for pleasure? 
the earth is like?” 


“Why, it is a planet, a ball of mineral 
matter,” was the reply. “It is covered 
with a hard outer crust beneath which 
are molten rock and metal subjected to 
great pressure.” 

Noklid nodded. “I see you have not 
forgotten all your knowledge in your 
silly rebellion. You give the usual 
belief; but I have another theory. Have 
you ever thought how great that pres- 
sure might be, or what one might find 
if he penetrated deeply enough into it? 

“Lee, will you go for me to find out 
what is there? If my supposition is 
correct, I cannot say what may happen 
to you; it is probably beyond human 
conception. 

“If you make the journey, and return 
safely to your body, I will see that you 
are pardoned. Ili I cannot accomplish 
that for you, I promise that I will find a 
means for your escape either from death 
or from imprisonment. You may cause 


140 


a new rebellion every week if you care 
to.” 

Lee Navarre looked really happy. “I 
accept gladly under the circumstances,” 
he said. ‘Now please remove these 
bonds. I give my parole into your 


hands, and my honor has always been 
regarded as something.’ 

Unhesitatingly Noklid took a tiny key 
from his pocket and unlocked the chains. 


II. 


LEE’S nearly nude form lay upon a 
dais. His body was clearly visible 
through the interlacing apparatus. He 
was lying so composed that he appeared 
to be asleep, but now and again certain 
of his muscles quivered spasmodically, 
and he breathed quickly. Qne would 
have supposed that he was dreaming. 

Noklid was very busy. The mind of 
his subject was now ready to leave its 
body, and he must watch closely lest 
it drift away out of control. There was 
a dial before him by which he could see 
what Lee saw, but he was unable to com- 
municate with his subject. He worked 
at his buttons and switches almost as 
energetically as he would have were he 
playing some difficult piece on a three 
bank organ. 

When Lee composed himself he sank 
quickly into what was half unconscious- 
ness and half a state of apathy. He felt 
his mind, though iteseemed to belong to 
some one else, trying to tear itself free 
from something that was holding it 
back. He struggled, mentally, and some 
of his energy was conducted to his mus- 
cles which quivered in sympathy. He 
had fergotten that he had a body. 

Then at last, as though with a sigh, he 
tore free. At once most of his realiza- 
tion came back to him. 

He seemed to be hovering, invisible 
even to himself, near the ceiling of the 
room. Beneath him Noklid labored over 
his prone body. He felt free and light 
as the wind, as though he could drift 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


anywhere at will. And then the scientist 
made an adjustment. 

At once it seemed that something 
compelled Lee to move. It forced him 
down, and down, and down. He fought 
against it, for he did not want to go. 
Finally he remembered the scientist's 
object and let himself go. 

Earth dank and dark enfolded him. 
He could see; at least he was conscious 
of his surroundings; and being in the 
depths of the earth did not hinder that 
vision. He watched the different strata 
shooting by. He was surprised that the 
dirt did not stop his movement. It was 
as though he were microscopic in size, 
or even smaller, and that he slipped 
between the dirt and rock particles. 

He left the ground quickly behind, 
since almost immediately it gave place 
to stone. For what seemed a long time 
he watched the veined rock hurrying 
by. He felt nothing besides a sensa- 
tion of movement, of acceleration. 
Neither hunger nor thirst nor heat nor 
cold bothered him; it was only his will 
that traveled. 

In a moment he was going so swiftly 
that he could see but little of the hurry- 
ing earth. It seemed to go by like the 
wind, growing continually. more solid, 
its heat rising one dergee for each fifty 
feet he went deeper. After fifty miles 
it rose much more swiftly, though how 
he knew he could not have said. The 
knowledge seemed borne in by some 
new and as yet undefinable sense. It 
was not a physical sensation in the least. 

After a while he noticed that the rock 
about him was growing slightly lumi- 
nous. He imagined that it was unthink- 
ably dense. He thought that he had 
gone several hundred miles by then. 

At about a thousand miles beneath the 
surface he realized that the rock was 
now liquid. It was thick and unutter- 
ably heavy, yet it was liquid neverthe- 
less. It flowed and changed as he shot 
through it, for it was now shifting with 
the Earth’s rotation. 


THE WAY OF THE EARTH 


Now Lee felt that a change was tak- 
ing place around him. It seemed that 
-the pressure, which mounted momen- 
tarily, was having an effect on the depths 
of the planet. At fifteen hundred miles 
he knew it to be a certainty. It had 
reached an enormous measurement by 
now; it piled in around him in what 
amounted to millions of tons, though 
having no physical body even that did 
not affect Lee. 

The molten rock about him seethed 
and boiled in titanic disturbance, and 
that pressure was crushing the atoms of 
the substances so that the atoms could 
hardly move. And, since they were 
heated to high temperature, they tried 
to move all the harder, so that it was 
only with difficulty that space could hold 
them. 


Space! That was it! From the time 


Noklid had first mentioned the experi- 
ment, Lee had felt that he should know 
what the scientist was hinting at, but it 
had all come about so quickly that he 


had not remembered. It had been along 
a line of thought which had never en- 
tered his mind of itself, since his interest 
lay in arms; but, having once heard it, 
he now recalled it. 

He had heard something of the sort 
at Tayle before the rebellion. In fact, 
it was before a thought of rebellion had 
even entered Lee’s.head. He had been a 
young student then. 

The very room where he. had been 
working came back to his mind’s eye, 
and vaguely he remembered the very 
phase of the atomic blast which he had 
been studying. He had had an idea that 
he might change it into a very power- 
ful weapon. Incidentally, he succeeded, 
but that has no place here. 


TWO bearded professors had been 
arguing near him. They had been dis- 
cussing the effect of gravity on space. 
Lee was.a little hazy about that. One 
of them had made a startling announee- 
ment. At first Lee had been so wrapped 


141 


in concentration that he had hardly been 
aware of their presence; but, as time 
passed and his object eluded him, some 
word or gesture had caught and held 
his attention. 

“Preposterous!” one of the two had 
exclaimed. “Utterly impossible. Why, 
if your theory is correct then each star 
and planet in the universe might hold 
the entire cosmos inside itself.” 

“Hardly,” the other had answered. 
“Remember, I did not say within it, I 
said that the great pressure of a planet’s 
interior might so warp space that——” 

“That the movement of the atoms 
would cause a bursting of space through ~ 
some higher dimension. I see your 
theory slightly now; go back over it 
briefly.” 

“Very well, then. Almost word for 
word, what [ said was: It is possible 
that the mounting pressure within the 
Earth, causing an excessive weight of 
the confined molten material, would be 
such that the movement of the molecules, 
due to the heat, might cause a bursting 
of space. Since it is seldom that a planet 
is blown to bits, that bursting would 
necessarily be through a higher dimen- 
sion. 

“Thus, an imaginary voyageur, who 
found it possible to withstand this pres- 
sure and heat, at a certain point beneath 
the earth’s surface would be carried 
through that dimension with the burst- 
ing. It would suddenly seem to him 
that he had been transposed to some re- 
mote part of the universe, or perhaps 
into an alien cosmos altogether. Do you 
see my point now?” 

Lee did not remember what the other 
had said, for at that moment he drifted 
again into the depths of his problem. 
Until this moment he had not thought 
of the argument. However, it had 
stayed in some little-used portion of his 
brain. 

It seemed dimly to him that the two 
had started into a long-drawn calculation 
as to what point that change would prob- 


142 


ably take place, but if so, the memory of 
it would not return. His mind had been 
too full of calculations of his own. 

Now he was sure that the professor 
had been right, and that, before his mind 
penetrated much farther, his surround- 
ings would suddenly seem to open out- 
ward. He could feel a slow movement 
as though the confined molecules around 
him were stretching periodically into less 
confined regions; as though they were 
forcing into some incomprehensible 
direction. 

Queer, he thought, that this change 
had so seldom been contemplated by 
men. For seven centuries they had been 
attempting to find some route to the 
stars, when all the time distances more 
remote than Andromeda were, para- 
doxically, a few thousand miles beneath 
their feet. 

Yet, he remembered, the knowledge 
would not have done them one iota of 
good, since one route was as difficult as 
another. The way of the Earth—of all 
those in history he was the first, and 
perhaps the last, to traverse it! 

That made him wonder what might 
happen to him. Could Noklid’s ma- 
chine control his wanderings after he 
had penetrated past that point? The 
thought startled him for a moment. If 
the machine had no effect upon him, 
might he not find himself lost forever 
out among the stars? He was not even 
sure that he could ever die, nor even 
that he was capable of movement of his 
own accord. 

Even as he felt that twinge of fear 
Lee knew that the atoms were bulging 
out in a new direction. For an instant 
it seemed that space, warped to pin-point 
size, exploded outward about him. His 
mind, following the line of least resist- 
ance, followed with that explosion! 

After that it was as though he had 
become monstrous, unthinkably enor- 
mous. His mind seemed to fill the 
cosmos throughout all length, breadth, 
thickness, and time! 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


Now the whole of space was visible 
to him. Galaxies with their suns and 
planets formed a network of long lines. 
He saw them as they had existed and 
were to exist through all time. At that 
moment it did not seem strange that he 
should see it thus; for all his thoughts 
were vast as his will which permeated 
the whole four-dimensional cosmos. 

He saw Earth as it had existed in pre- 
glacial ages before the coming of men; 
he saw Noklid in his laboratory bending 
over his own dead corpse; and he saw 
the planet grown cold with ages and 
falling into a dim, red sun. 

The whole universe was visible in this 
manner, and it did not seem strange. 
Afterward, since the sensation had been 
so vast, he found that he could remember 
but little of it. 

Nevertheless, something on another 
planet in a remote galaxy caught and 
held his attention. It was a planet much 
like Earth, though it revolved around a 
double sun. And its inhabitants were 
men ! 

As nearly as he could say later, that 
planet was the only one throughout all 
space-time where conditions of environ- 
ment were such that creatures altogether 
identical to the human race of Earth had 
evolved. But the duplication was per- 
fect, and for that reason it drew his 
interest. 

In one of the three cities of the planet, 
during an era when its civilization was 
very similar to that of Earth during the 
second millenium, Lee saw a man work- 
ing on apparatus beneath which an un- 
conscious body was lying. He knew 
that here an experiment was taking place 
which was very similar to the one he 
had undergone. He realized that the 
subject’s mind was somewhere out in 
free space searching for knowledge to 
enable him to perform a certain task. 

Lee inspected the preceding happen- 
ings of the planet to find out what that 
task was. He watched the scientist. He 
looked at the inhabitants of the planet; 


THE WAY OF THE EARTH 


and it is possible that he was able to 
read the minds of those he watched. 
Then, as though he had merely been 
waiting to do this, the colossal grasp 
faded from him. As everything had 
exploded outward it now closed in. He 
felt himself borne from the height he 
had reached as though by the closing of 
a grasp. The chaotic fury of the change 
overwhelmed him, hurled him over and 
over, and buried his mind in oblivion! 


III. 


HATZHO of Elbon-on-Radrok was 
discouraged. His people could not hold 
their civilization much longer in the face 
of the encroaching Nark-nur unless 
something was done, and Hatzho had 
done his best. 

It had all begun ten years before with 
the first sight of the Nark-nur, which, 
translated, means space reptile. No one 
knew just where they came from, 
though, by a calculation over a period 
of years of the point in its orbit where 
Radrok came upon them, it was finally 
decided that they lived in free space. 
By those calculations the things could 
not be affected by gravitation, since the 
place where Radrok met them never 
varied. 

It was finally decided that they fol- 
lowed the two suns, soaking in energy 
from them and waiting for Radrok’s 
orbital movement to bring it around to 
them. Then they calmly floated down 
for their meals. As to where they had 
been before their first visit to Radrok, 
no one knew. 

They were metallic-looking creatures 
ten times the length of a tall man and 
thick in proportion. They were shaped 
much like the flying reptiles which lived 
in the forests around the three cities of 
Radrok, from which they got their 
names. Yet what they were composed 
of, or how they navigated space, were 
questions which the Radrokians could 
not answer. Some claimed they were 


143 


nonthinking creatures borne hither and 
thither by. the very force of light itself. 
Others claimed that they were highly 
reasoning, and realized that a few days 
of each year was as long as the planet 
could stand their sallies. Hatzho said 
that neither theory was correct, taking 
his stand on an intermediate one, but no 
one knew who was right. 

To the majority of the Radrokians 
it would have made little difference what 
they were composed of, how they came 
and went, or, in fact, whether they could 
move at all, had they not shown so great 
an appetite for the buildings of men. 
Of course, the scientists would have been 
interested in them—they were interested 
in everything new, but they were the 
only ones who cared. 

However, the creatures had shown 
that appetite, and they ate enormously. 
Further than that they came in myriad 
numbers, larger and larger each year, 
so speculation on the subject assumed 
heroic proportions. 

Ten years before it had been a very 
great surprise to the Radrokians to be 
waked one morning to find that their 
buildings were being eaten away over 
their heads. “They had come rushing 
out in all states of disapparel to flee. 

Above them, hovering as easily in 
mid-air as though they were on solid 
ground, were the space reptiles—calmly 
munching away on the buildings. It 
appeared that they enjoyed solid food 
of a mineral type. The stone and metal 
structures of Radrok just suited them, 
and they ate to their hearts’ content. 

Since all men, whether they hail from 
Radrok or from Earth, are inclined to 
be egotistical, it struck the populace as 
strange that the reptiles showed no appe- 
tite for them. It would have paralyzed 
them with fear, have sent them scurry- 
ing away in millions, if the monsters 
had been tearing down the buildings to 
get at them, but it would not have sur- 
prised them half as much. 

As it was, they left their three cities 


144 


in a very orderly manner, and with al- 
most no loss of life, but they were both 
chagrined and furious. 

Yet matters were bad enough as they 
stood. Each of the reptiles held an 
enormous amount, since they seemed en- 
tirely hollow. And they were a prolific 
race. Their first sally, while causing 
few casualties, made homeless fully half 
the population of each of the three cities. 

Out in the open country, where the 
tillers of the soil lived, nothing hap- 
pened, for the reptiles paid no attention 
to their rambling buildings. This news 
threatened to overthrow the balance of 
population, since it was causing many 
families to migrate from the cities. Be- 
side finding some way to destroy the 
invaders, the Radrokian heads must 
also stop the migration. 

That they accomplished, but the other 
seemed beyond them. There seemed no 
way of driving off the space reptiles. 
Great guns were commandeered, but 
their shells tore entirely through the 
monsters, seeming not to disable them 
in the least. They went on eating, 
broken bits of stone and metal dribbling 
out through the holes in their anatomies. 
Seemingly the things had no sense of 
feeling. 

And even when the humans did their 


worst, they still paid no atténtion td - 


them. As Hatzho said, “These peculiar 
creatures seem entirely oblivious to the 
existence of the genus homo. It appears 
that they look upon our planet only as a 
feeding ground.” 

Naturally he did not speak in English, 
but that is the gist of what he said. 

After the first army of space reptiles 
had sailed away into the sky, the Rad- 
rokians. gave great sighs of relief and 
set about rebuilding their cities. That 
the majority of them had not been killed 
by falling stone they could attribute 
partly to the fact that the facilities for 
leaving the cities were so good; but it 
was mostly. due to the fact that the 
monsters were so voracious that they 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


continued to eat the buildings even while 
they broke. However, the Radrokians 
gave them no thanks for that. 

Almost exactly a year later the things 
returned to set about their eating as 
calmly as before. Where previously 
the people had fled in awe, they now 
stood in fury. Some house owners even 
tried to drive the creatures away that 
they might save their property, and as 
a result a number of the population were 
killed. And the space reptiles stayed 
longer this year. 

The reason for that had been the ad- 
vance in weapons. All year imventors 
had been working day and night to have 
machines available with which they 
might blow the monsters off the face of 
the planet; but it was all to no avail. 
The only result was in reverse, since 
even after a reptile was full of holes it 
continued to stuff its interior which 
naturally could not be filled. 

Only when the things were blown to 
bits did they cease their gorging. And 


‘ they were so many, and they could move 


with such rapidity that blowing them all 
to bits was entirely out of the question. 
And each year their numbers increased 
no matter how many were killed. 

Had the Radrokians cared to, they 
might have stopped building their houses 
above the surface of the ground. Being 
only human the thought never seriously 
entered their heads. Amidst impreca- 
tions on the appetites of the wreckers 
they continued rebuilding their cities, 
only to have them destroyed each year. 
As to what they might do for revenge 
they had no idea. 

Their civilization was at stake. 


LIKE his fellow citizens, Hatzho was 
concerned in the matter. Apart from 
them he saw the uselessness of fighting 
the things with what weapons they had. 
On the other hand he had ideas of his 
own, and he set about working on these 
ideas. 

Since he felt that he could do better 

AST-—9 


THE WAY OF THE EARTH 


Noklid was very busy. The mind of his subject was now 
ready to leave its body and he must watch closely—— 


if he had the planet’s resources behind 
him, he obtained an appointment with 
Warlahk, the ruler. He was closeted 
but a short time in the rich reception 
room with its ornate adornments. 

“Certainly,” Hatzho said, “we can get 
nowhere by the means we use.” 

“Very evident,” was the reply. “What 
do you suggest?” 

Hatzho contemplated for a few mo- 
ments before he spoke. “We could 

AST—10 


easily kill all the things by means of 
intra-atomic energy.” 

He got no further, for just then 
Warlahk guffawed impolitely. He was 
tired, and he was never too careful at 
the best of times. “Doubtless,” he said. 
“In that way we could kill the things in 
almost no time. On the other hand our 
scientists have been trying to liberate that 
energy for something over a hundred 
years, and as yet they have not suc- 


146 ASTOUNDING STORIES 


ceeded. So just what are you going to 
do about that?” 

Hatzho arose unceremoniously. “I 
told you what I thought,” he said very 
stiffly. “Now I will take my leave.” He 
did not add that had the ruler spoken 
more pleasantly Hatzho would have laid 
out his plans. Nor did he add that were 
he successful in what he contemplated, 
Warlahk might do well to look to his 
throne. As he told Na-ani later, he had 
always thought it was a poor man who 
ruled Radrok. 

Na-ani was the scientist’s daughter 
and was as interested in her father’s pro- 
fession as her father himself. Being a 
dutiful child, she listened politely to 
whatever he said. Very often she was 
able to offer good advice. 

With him she set to work on his idea. 

“Tt sounds preposterous, I know,” he 
said. “On the other hand I believe it 


the most feasible way. We realize how 
much power there is in the atom, but so 
far we’ve found no way of releasing it. 
Yet somewhere in the universe, probably 


on many of the numberless planets, 
there are beings who have found how. 
With my machine I shall be able to learn 
their secret.” 

“Perhaps so,” Na-ani answered. She 
had been raised to look upon the most 
impossible things as often being the 
easiest. “It is only your means of find- 
ing out which seems so strange. If you 
were attempting to build a flier to sail 
out to sea, it would not seem so queer, 
but the idea of divorcing a person’s mind 
from his body and sending it out to spy 
on the inhabitants of other planets is 
beyond me. I even dream about it. It’s 
wonderful, too. Daddy, why not send 
me?” 

The scientist smiled in spite of him- 
self, though he shook his head. “No, 
no, my dear,” he told her. “Your life 
is much too precious to risk on anything 
of the sort.” Which showed that, in 
spite of his profession, Hatzho was en- 
tirely human. “Besides,” he added, “I 


need you here to help me. It has already 
been decided that Aranar will be our 
subject, since his mind is sufficiently 
well trained to understand the most in- 
tricate of machinery.” 

“T still think I would like to go,” 
Na-ani said before she changed the sub- 
ject. “You say that the process will 
send one’s mind almost as quickly as 
thought—hundreds and hundreds the 
times of light.” She sighed. There 
are few things so engrossing as a con- 
templation of unutterable distance. 

A few days later everything was 
ready, and before many more hours had 
passed Aranar’s body lay as though 
asleep on a dais. Above him was ap- 
paratus almost identical to that of Nok- 
lid of Earth. The experiment had 
begun. 

Na-ani was very interested, though 
she did not appear to be. Aranar with 
his godlike body and his handsome face 
had claimed the girl’s attention when 
she first saw him, though the young man 
had been so engrossed in his study that 
he never noticed her. 

At first that had quickened her in- 
terest, but as time went by and the man 
still never seemed to see her, she had 
almost forgotten him. Now that he was 
in the midst of an adventure which she 
would have liked to have taken, she 
thought very much about him, though 
she would never have admitted it. At 
least, that is supposedly the way she 
reasoned. In the case of a woman one 
can never be sure. 

Then, right in the middle of the ex 
periment, the subject died. His heart 
stopped beating entirely, and every ind 
cation showed that life was extinct. 

For a long hour, Hatzho and Na-aal 
worked over him. They used evefy 
means known to Radrokian science to 
bring him back to life, but it all seemed 
of no avail. Finally, when they wert 
ready to give up all hope, Aranar sud: 
denly began to breathe again. Hatzho 
turned back to his controls. 


iy SS a ee A oe 


| ee 


THE WAY OF THE EARTH 


“Can you bring him back now, 
daddy?” Na-ani asked. 

“I believe so,” was the reply. “But 
don’t ask questions of me now, dear. 
I'll be very busy for a while yet, and I 
want to be left completely alone. You 
can stay in the room if you want to, 
since I think you can find plenty of 
work.” 


IV. 


HATZHO did not know it, nor did 
Na-ani, nor Aranar, the subject, but the 
three of them were due for a change in 
their plans, as was Noklid of Earth. 
Lee Navarre knew it just before un- 
consciousness overtook him, but he had 
seen Na-ani and did not care. 

It all came about with Lee’s breaking 
through space. Hatzho had not sent 
the mind of his subject into the void at 
the same time as Noklid sent Lee into 
the earth, but the two happenings took 
place together in absolute time. That 
is just another way of saying that time 
played no part in the incident; for when 
Lee broke through space he was above 
all time. Hatzho of Radrok may have 
lived a billion years before or a billion 
years after Lee was born, but the two 
of them existed together in the same 
scheme of things, and that was all that 
was necessary. 

And so it happened that the two wills, 

. Lee's and the Radrokian, Aranar’s, were 
switched; perhaps because Lee in his 
absoluteness had willed that things 
_ come to pass as they subsequently 


No matter how it happened—this is 
what took place: Hatzho’s machine sud- 
denly linked its meshes into the mind of 
Lee Navarre, while Noklid’s, on Earth, 
losing control of its subject, reached out 
around space time and became entangled 
in the mind of Aranar. 

The change was practically perfect. 
For an hour both subjects were appar- 
tatly dead since for that period they 


147 


seemed linked to no mind or will what- 
soever. Then each revived, and Lee 
found that his ego now inhabited the 
body of the Radrokian while Aranar 
awoke to find himself in the body of Lee 
Navarre. 

Here the story has done with Earth. 
It might be well to say that both Aranar 
and Noklid, impersonal scientists, were 
elated with what transpired. And since 
his subject was now no longer Lee 
Navarre, honest old Noklid obtained his 
pardon, and the Radrokian prospered 
and came to high esteem on Earth. But 
all that is purely incidental. 

Lee was also elated when he found 
himself in the new body in Hatzho’s 
laboratory. His interest was mostly in 
the girl, Na-ani, whom he found was 
looking directly at him when he opened 
his eyes. For it must be admitted that 
Lee, who had gone through thirty Earth 
years unassailed, had already lost his 
heart completely to this girl of an alien 
world. 

“Aranar was a fool,” he said with 
much conviction. 

Hatzho thought his words were only 
the awakening mumble of one who had 
miraculously escaped death, and said 
nothing. Na-ani read something in the 
frank eyes of the young man and 
blushed deeply. She was very lovely. 

“Did you find what we sent you for, 
Aranar ?”’ Hatzho asked almost at once, 
rubbing his hands together. 

For the moment Lee was at a loss to 
understand him. However, occupying 
Aranar’s brain as he did, all that in- 
dividual’s gathered knowledge was at 
his finger tips, though it did not change 
Lee in the least. He began using that 
at once, and in a moment part of him 
seemed that he had been Radrokian all 
his life. 

He understood when Hatzho repeated 
the question. ‘ 

“Yes,” he said. “At least I know that 
which you sent Aranar out to discover. 
But before I speak of it let me make a 


148 


little confession. You see, I, the will 
inside this body am not Aranar at all. 
I’m from a different planet entirely.” 

“So that’s how it stands,” Hatzho 
mused when Lee had made a thorough 
explanation. “Well and good. I won- 
der what Warlahk would think if he 
knew about this.” 

Though Warlakk knew nothing just 
then it was not long before he learned 
something on the subject. 

Hatzho’s actions when they parted 
had done much to arouse his suspicions, 
and he was not above having the scien- 
tist spied upon. - He knew that while as 
a whole his subjects were not averse to 
his rule many of them were wanting a 
change. 

He had been realizing that slowly 
since the first coming of the space rep- 
tiles. He felt, and probably was right, 
that the main reason for the growing 
dissatisfaction of the populace was that 
they wanted some one to blame for their 
troubles. Since he was so much in the 
public eye he made a very good scape- 
goat. It would have taken a very strong 
man to avert such blame, and Warlahk 
was not strong. Radrokian history had 
seen many better rulers. 

As all the gods knew, if there was 
any way he could stop the ravages of 
the reptiles he would certainly do so. 
They were getting on his nerves as much 
as they were on any one’s—more so, 
probably. Confound their building eat- 
ing, anyway ! 

For perhaps the thousandth time he 
wondered why he had not listened to 
Hatzho. If he had, he might have 
learned something. Now the scientist 
disliked him, furthermore he could see 
that the people were very nearly ready 
for revolt. 

Warlahk knew the scientist well 
enough to realize that he was perfectly 
capable of leading such revolt. It was 
after he had thought these matters over 
thoroughly that he decided to have the 
scientist watched. 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


What he heard did not cause him to 
regret his action. It was now becoming 
common rumor that Hatzho had schemes 
against the ruling faction of the planet 
On the other hand there was absolutely 
no evidence in that direction, so Warlahk 
could only scheme and listen. As he 
told one of his councilors, “It is too bad 
that we cannot take the law into our own 
hands as my great grandfather would 
have done.” 

The councilor nodded sagely. 

Warlahk’s spies brought him other 
knowledge also, but before long they 
were public rumor, too. He was per 


fectly willing to admit that if Hatzho 
were planning to overthrow him, he was 
going about it in perfect style. 


HE HEARD that Hatzho had built 
a machine which had entirely changed 
the will of a young Radrokian in his 
employ. If he could trust his spies, the 
Radrokian, whose name had _ been 
Aranar, now had the mind of a denizen 
from another and older planet, and was 
one who knew much of the forces of 
light and energy. 

Even now he was building certain 
machines which would destroy the space 
reptiles by the power of the disintegrated 
atom. And after that was accomplished, 
it was whispered, he who had been 
Aranar but who was now called Lih of 
Navahrr, would turn his machines 
against the great palace in Elbon-om 
Radrok. 

Knowing something of the methods 
of spies, Warlahk took all this informa 
tion with several grains of that sub 
stance which makes sea water salty. 
Nevertheless, the news bothered him 
considerably, especially on such nights 
as sleep was a hard mistress to woo. As 
a result he sent other spies. Theit 
stories tallied so closely with what he 
had heard before that he called in his 
most trusted lieutenant. 

“What is your opinion on the sub 
ject?” he asked, when he had repeated 


THE WAY OF THE EARTH 


the tale after his own fashion. He had 
learned, as had previous rulers both 
upon Earth and on Radrok, that flattery 
is a very good crowbar when it is ap- 
plied properly. 

The lieutenant stroked his chin. “I 
believe that it would be best to let the 
scientist work on in peace,” he said 
finally. “If he does have a weapon 
which will kill the reptiles, then let him 
use it. After he has finished we can 
attend to him and his ideas of rebellion. 
We know for sure that he has almost 
no followers at present.” 

“Very well,” the ruler replied; “but 
we had best not wait too long. It is 
said that his machine acts upon the 
principle of atomic energy. If that is 
true we have nothing that would stand 
against it.” 

The lieutenant smiled carefully. “As 
your majesty knows, one cannot believe 
every story he hears. It is doubtful that 
Hatzho can destroy the space reptiles; 
certainly he cannot overthrow you. 

“Yet if it is true that he does plan 
to rebel, he knows that his best and only 
chance will be when he has slain the 
space reptiles, and not until then. Be- 
fore long he will announce what he 
plans to do, so that no one else can claim 
the glory for the act. Also he will an- 
nounce where he will do the thing, and 
at what time. 

“When the day comes my men and I 
will be waiting. If Hatzho is not suc- 
cessful, he need worry us no longer; 
if he is, then I will act.” The rest of 
his speech was wholly of a technical 
nature. 

The lieutenant had argued quite 
rationally. Almost exactly a month 
later, by Radrokian measurement, and 
about fifteen days before the space rep- 
tiles were expected, Hatzho announced 
that this year he would put an end to 
them. 

His announcement caused much 
speculation. A similar speech by a lesser 
personage would have caused only deri- 


149 


sion, but it was well known that the 
things Hatzho prophesied usually took 
place. So since he also announced from 
where and in what manner he would 
destroy the monsters, most people de- 
cided to be. there. 

On hearing of this Warlahk beamed 
upon his lieutenant. “It is all happening 
as you said it would. I am very much 
in debt to your genius. But Hatzho 
claims that he will slay the things over 
each of the three cities simultaneously.” 

“Quite true,” the lieutenant answered. 
That night he would dream of the day 
he would be one of the greatest men in 
the empire. “But he also says that the 
three machines with which he slays the 
monsters will be useless after the act 
is completed. 

“I imagine that will be true in the 
case of two of the weapons, since prob- 
ably he trusts no one but himself. That 
will make our work easy since we will 
have only Hatzho to contend with. I 
understand that he will superintend the 
slaying of the reptiles over Elbon. 
When he has finished we will surround 
him and lead him away.” 

“And the people?” 

“The people will know nothing about 
it, your majesty. We will not be in uni- 
form, and we will do the thing so quickly 
that the spectators will not realize what 
has happened until it is all over.” 

“But what of the man who made the 
machine? Lih, they call him, or some 
such name.” 

The lieutenant paused. “In all likeli- 
hood, he will be there too. If not, we 
needn’t worry about him either; he 
would be nothing if it were not for 
Hatzho. If he is really from another 
planet he will find it hard enough to live 
after the scientist is gone.” 

Even while they spoke Lee was help- 
ing Hatzho. He realized that he was 
an object for popular discussion, and 
he had ideas for turning that to his 
advantage, though he did not know that 
the ruler of the planet was in the habit 


150 


of speaking of him. Even if he had, 
he would, probably not have cared; he 
was working too hard those days for it 
to matter much. what any one said. 

Hatzho also was very busy. He 
waited until the last possible moment to 
set up his. atomic machines, since he was 
afraid that their secret might be learned. 

It was only three days before the ex- 
pected coming of the reptiles that he 
loaded. two of the weapons into powerful 
little fliers and carried them off to 
Thadrad and Raldac, the other two 
cities. He inspected them carefully to 
see that they were set up properly, and 
he left them heavily. guarded. 

Lee had built a very small machine 
for himself. No one knew what its 
purpose was, since to any questions 
about it he replied with very evasive 
answers. 

Night on Radrok, in spite of the two 
suns, was very much like it had been 
on Earth. The central orbs revolved 
around each other so swiftly and were 
so near together and the planet was at 
such distance from them that day was 
only a little longer than the period of 
darkness. 

Of course, there were certain times 
during the year when the suns shone 
from such oblique angles that the light 
was almost continuous, but that was only 
for a short time, and nowhere near the 
season. when the reptiles were expected. 

On the evening before the Annihila- 
tion, as the day was known all over the 
planet, Lee had a long taik with Na-ani. 
What he said was his own affair, and it 
is sufficient to state that the girl looked 
at him in wonder, giving place slowly to 
indecision. Finally she nodded her head 
in agreement. 

“All right,” she told him, “I’m with 
you. I have sufficient faith in you to 
trust you implicitly. I think that what 
you suggest is much the best for every 
one. Thank you for telling me.” 

And Lee drew her to him tenderly 
and kissed her, and when she left him 


ASTOUNDING. STORIES 


her countenance was so radiant as to 
seem. that it had been transformed into 
something heavenly. 


¥. 


HATZHO felt that he could trust 
his men, so he had taught two of them 
how to operate the atomic machines, 
One of these he sent to destroy the mon- 
sters over Thadrad, the second was to 
officiate at Raldac, while he himself had 
decided to kill those at Elbon, the capital 
city. 

The space reptiles had been so cata- 
logued and studied that it was known 
one year just how many could be ex- 
pected the next, so Hatzho had fixed the 
machines of his confederates to burn out 
after the monsters were destroyed. He 
had no wish for his main weapon to fall 
into the hands of those who would 
presently be his enemies. But, as Hatzho 
did not advertise, his own machine was 
not so constructed. 


However, Warlahk knew that the 
scientist was an old fox, that while he 
was in the habit of telling the truth he 
was not above weaving a fabrication. 
Therefore he saw to it that soldiers 
would be waiting to surround each of 
the three machines, though the greater 
force would wait at Elbon. 


Since his own curiosity was. aroused 
he decided to be there too, and he dis- 


guised himself for the occasion. Off- 
cially he had removed his personage to 
the open country where he would stay 
until the reptiles had been annihilated or 
had gone of their own accord. 

The day dawned clear. The atomic 
machine at Elbon had been placed in a 
great open park in the middle of the city, 
at a point where it could not be injured 
by falling building material. People were 
gathered in thousands about it. The 
estimation was that over half the in- 
habitants of the city were there. Hatzho, 
who. wished it known how he accom 


THE WAY OF THE EARTH 


plished his work, had chosen the spot 
well. 

Lee was noticeably absent. Even the 
spectators saw that and wondered at it, 
for they had heard much of the man. It 
was said that he seemed a common Rad- 
rokian, except there was something in 
his mien which suggested another world, 
and that those who saw him felt the 
difference at once. Where was he now, 
they asked one another? 

But it was not long before their in- 
terest turned to another matter. A small 
boy was the first to see a dot in the pale 
sky, a dot growing swiftly, and fol- 
lowed by others similar to it. He called 
the attention of his playmate, and they 
both craned their necks. Others no- 
ticed and looked up. The space reptiles 
had arrived! 

They were barely large enough for the 
watchers to see them for what they were 
when Hatzho opened up his artillery. 
He pulled a tiny lever, and that was all! 


Those who watched felt that some- 
No fire was 


thing had gone wrong. 
seen to shoot from the machine as they 
had expected, and they began to push 
back. Murmurs were starting. 

But when they looked back at the sky 
they found that the number of the rep- 


tiles had grown noticeably less. Even 
while they watched the things dimin- 
ished, though the fact deterred those 
that followed them not at all. They 
were coming down to eat, and if their 
fellows vanished, that meant all the more 
food for them, or so they appeared to 
think. Their wings shone like burnished 
copper, and their great jaws opened. 
Then they vanished like dust motes 
borne out of a light beam by the cur- 
rents of the atmosphere. The last of 
them was hovering to bite a chunk from 
a near by building when the power 
caught it. Not even dust from it floated 
down. 

The watchers cheered wildly. They 
applauded Hatzho’s name to the stars, 


151 


but through their shouting ran the cry 
that he who had made the victory pos- 
sible appear. 

Hatzho felt that now was his time. A 
few words would win that multitude; 
he could take the royal palace; and be- 
fore long Radrok would be his. He 
stepped forward to say those words, 
though he realized that the greatest vic- 
tory he might ever win had just come 
to him. He cleared his throat. 

It was at the same time that Warlahk’s 
men surrounded him. They had been 
dressed as civilians, ununiformed, and 
they had him before he recognized them. 
It was all as easy as the lieutenant had 
prophesied. : 

When Hatzho realized what had taken 
place it was too late to act. And even 
with his disregard of human life, he 
would hardly have turned the atomic 
machine against those who surrounded 
him. It was a weapon that he could not 
control; it would destroy, but it would 
destroy whatever was in its path, cut- 
ting a swath for miles. Lee had kept 
the atomic machine, as he had finally 
perfected it on Earth, to himself. 


THEY were starting to lead Hatzho 
away when an interruption came. It 
came from the top of the building which 
the last space reptile had been ready to 
eat when it was destroyed, and it came 
spectacularly. 

A figure stepped forward to the edge 
of the building. It was that of a com- 
manding personage; even at that dis- 
tance they could all see that. 

“Wait a moment,” it said, and every 
one below heard distinctly. They did 
not know that Lee Navarre was making 
use of a principle for amplifying the 
voice, and that that principle had been 
known on Earth for a century before 
he left, but they were none the less 
impressed. Each one of them knew that 
this was the man they had been waiting 
to see, so they listened with bated breath. 


152 


Not all of them, though. As Lee 
appeared. one of those who had sur- 
rounded Hatzho leaped toward the 
atomic machine. Lee pressed the but- 
ton on a black, hand weapon he carried, 
and the man vanished. That was the 
first time the Radrokians saw a per- 
fected atomic blast at work. 

The sight should have thrown the 
watchers into pandemonium; but it is 
hard to predict the psychology of 
crowds. Had the man fallen dead they 
might have gone wild; since he only 
vanished they stood in wonderment. As 
they were then a word might have had 
almost any reaction. 

All his life Lee had been accustomed 
to swaying opinion. Half his battles 
had been won by speech from the time 
he was a student at Tayle until the day 
he led a revolt which almost won him 
the world. And he knew that his power 
lay not in words so much as in him. 

“People,” he said, “this morning you 
have seen a menace to your planet 
destroyed by a new weapon. You know 
what such an instrument as that, and 
this”—he tapped the black weapon he 
carried—‘“can do.” And in some way 
the words had the quieting effect he 
wanted to produce. 

That was his opening. After that 
followed a speech which was great, not 
so much for what it meant, but for what 
it made his listeners feel. 

He spoke of Warlahk, and he made 
the audience think that while he was 
sincere the man was not a fit ruler. He 
spoke of Hatzho, and they felt that 
while his was a strong personality it was 
not a ruling one. He carried his listen- 
ers with him so that they thought they 
anticipated his every phrase, that he but 
put their own thoughts into words. 

And he ended with, “Since it is not 
well that a people should be rulerless 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


at such a time, choose now an emperor, 
Radrokians, whom will you have?” 

They shouted, “Lih, Lih of Navahrr!” 
And Lee smiled, for that was what he 
had intended from the first that they 
should say. 

The day was won then, yet before he 
came down to the throne Lee did a thing 
which sealed tight the door of the 
affection he had engendered in the hearts 
of his audience. 

He beckoned behind him and another 
figure stepped into view. “Since,” he 
said, and as before, every one heard him, 
“since it is best that I have one of you 
with me at all times, Na-ani, the daugh- 
ter of Hatzho, has consented to be my 
wife. People, salute your empress!” 

That was all. After that there was 
no trouble, for it had been Warlahk who 
leaped toward the atomic machine and 
vanished. He was as dead as the space 
reptiles. 

Thus Lee Navarre lost an empire on 
Earth and won another on a planet so 
distant that the galaxy of which it is a 
part cannot be seen by our telescopes; 
but that did not make it any the less 
real and dear to its new ruler. 

Strangely, Hatzho was not the least 
angered by the turn events had taken. 
When he finished gasping and the ad- 
justment was clear in his mind he was 
as pleased as every one else. 

“T had planned it like that all the 
time,” he told Na-ani the first chance he 
had to speak to her confidentially. “I 
knew that I would not make a good 
ruler. I’m too old and unused to such 
things. The reason I hadn’t spoken 
about it was that I wasn’t sure you cared 
for Lee. Why. hadn’t you told me, 
child ?” 

“That was my secret,” she said. For 
she had known all along what Hatzho 
thought; but that, too, was her secret. 


How Criticism Helps 


In this, the first issue in our third year of building the NEW 
Astounding Stories, I have some suggestions to offer you. 


For two years I have read your letters of criticism carefully, 
thoughtfully, weighing one against the other, checking the trend 
of opinion in the majority, striving to improve our magazine in 
keeping with your expressed desires. 

But in checking your criticism I am forced to ignore perhaps 
ten per cent of those received because they tell me nothing. This 
is what I would like to correct, with your coéperation. 

Here is an example: “—your August issue was lousy. Both 
your rivals print good stories but you have only trash. Your cover 
was terrible, also.” 

The writer of the above quotation then proceeded to say that 
he liked Astounding best of any magazine in the field! So—there 
wasn’t much help to be gained from that, was there? 

Then one reader said: “—better tell Williamson to stick to 
something he understands.” 

Well! I don’t tell our authors WHAT to write. If I did that 
I’d have a one-track magazine in three months. And I don’t think 
any of us understand perfectly at what point we must shut off our 
imaginations in the realm of superscience. 

This much I do know! We see the best of the crop of science- 
fiction stories every month, and if a good one gets by it is because 
we haven’t the space to print it and' because we do not take ad- 
vantage of authors by holding stories for years on the excuse of 

“payment on publication.” 

You know from the covers last month and this that Astounding 
Stories, which was the underdog two years ago, is now the popular 
leader in the field. 

It has been your helpful criticism, as much as any other factor, 
which has combined to bring this about. So it is only natural for 
me to want all your letters to be constructive. If you dislike one 
story—tell me WHY! I have always listened; I always will. If you 
like a story unusually well, tell me WHY ; and thus help to guide me 


for the succeeding issues. 

The growing debate as to the amount of science in the stories 
is very helpful. I’d like a thousand opinions so that I can safely 
draw a final conclusion. 

I want Astounding to reach its full maturity by 1938, and from 
that time on to maintain its mature vigor for many years! This 
year we are facing is a vital part of our program of development. 
We are young and we want debate and constructive criticism. If 
there isn’t any vital criticism, don’t try to manufacture some. _ That 
only confuses the issue. Don’t hesitate to say stories are above 
par. That is good constructive criticism, too. 

I hope we agree and understand each other. I know we have 
the finest magazine, the best stories, the most capable writers in the 
field. And I also know that we can continue to improve them all 
this year.—The Editor. 


. AN OPEN FORUM 


Pfui, Pfui! 


xs 
ui, pfui, double, triple, and quadruple pfui 
om you, 7h H. Welch. 

The nerve of some people. If you are so 
against science-fiction why, oh why, don’t you 
keep it_to yourself? I hope you received the 
letter I wrote you personally. In it, you 
doubtlessly discovered, I told’ you more fully 
just what I think of you. 

Now that that’s finished, “Dictator’ Tucker, 
did you receive the half cover of a magazine, 
illustrating a STF story, I sent you? This is 
my contribution to the SPWSSTFM. The ‘other 
half will be sent when I am elected super- 
dictator of your “worthy?????” organization. 

Now. I suppose the best way to get this 
letter in print is to dish out a few bouquets. 

The stories? I have read only four of them, 
but, if the other four—not counting the serial— 
are as good as the first, they will suit me. 
Man of Iron was very delicious, or perhaps I 
should say delightful. Poor Lemmans, though 
—he should have picked a more opportune time 
to “knock off’ Doc Merra. The Galactic Circle 
was undoubtedly one of Jack’s best. 

Say there, Mr. Bashore, there was only one 
wire staple in my April issue of Astounding 
Stories. Maybe the “dictator” is starting on his 
crusade, and thus far has succeeded in remov- 
ing only two staples, one from each of our 
magazines. What say, “Dic?’ 

Before I forget. Is there any chance of 
etting held of some of those three-year-old 

stounding Stories you mentioned, Bob? That’s 
all, 72, and “Thanks for listening.”—Phillip 
McKernan, 827 Greenwood Avenue, San Mateo, 
California. 


Thank You! 


Dear Editor: 

It was certainly a pleasure to meet the editor 
of my faverite magazine while I was in New 
York. I enjoyed meeting you more than any 
one else while I was there. 

I always turn to your pep-editorial page first. 


I'd sooner read that type than the scientific 
ones. That Jack Williamson story scheduled 
for mext month must be some tale if it beats 
The Galactic Circle. That was a honey of & 
Taines’ serial of course continues to en 
The two novelettes, both sequels, were 
good, as sequels go. The Upper Level Road, 
and The Star That Would Not Behave, were the 
best shorts in the issue—well written around 
good ideas. The Phantom Dictator was g 
except for the ending. I hate madhouse end 


ngs. 

The cover is a dandy, although what is 
Saturn doing so close to the Earth? Deld 
didn’t do so well this time. The work looks 
rushed. Please don’t cut part of the illustration 
off for blurbs and such, as in Rebellion. 

wish you could use a thinner paper through- 
out the magazine. 

What has happened to Charies W. _Diffin? 
He used to write some excellent stories for 
Astounding. 

Can’t you spare a page or a half page for 
the names of next month’s stories? Yours 
Astounding Stories has a quarterly supplement. 

Welcome to Astounding Stories, J. Harvey 
Haggard !—Jack Darrow, 4224 N. Sawyer Ave 
nue, Chicago, Illinois. 


Enthusiastic! 


Dear Editor: 

Had I written this letter in May, when I! 
planned, I might have made a remark something 
to this effect: “Astounding Stories is about om 
a@ par with its leading rival.” But, after read 
ing the June, July, and August issues of said 
publication, I am thoroughly convinced that 
r+ mad Stories is leader “what am” in it 

ie] 


d. 

My enthusiasm was without bounds as I fit 
ished Jack Williamson’s, The Galactic Circle. 
I was also glad to see Nat Schachner back 
again. The Bopper Level Road, by Warner Vas 
Lorne was very good, as was Lost In Spect, 
and Man of Iron. 

Twelve Eighty-Seven is accelerating, and if J 
miss the conclusion of it something rash 
happen around here. 


—_—a& eis ee 


“—oco $98 (eo w oa 


SPs r>eeraraa 


a= keke 


BRASS 


I hope you will print this letter in Brass 
Tacks because I want other fellows, about my 
age, who are true science-fiction fans, as corre- 
spondents. I am 14 years old, and have already 
connected with one good correspondent through 
Brass Taeks but crave more. So come in and 
write to me, fellows. 

A few authors that I want to see in Astound- 
ing Stories are: A. Connel, Leslie Stone, and 
Festus Pragnell. A few authors that I want 
to see more of in Astounding Stories are: John 
Russell Fearn, Eando Binder, Stanton A. 
Coblents, J. George Frederick and Edmond 
Hamilton. 

In the July issue you did not list Schneeman 
with your story illustrators along with Dold 
and Marchioni. However he illustrated Eziles 
of the Stratosphere. I don’t like the illustra- 

ion, the story or the author, Frank B. Long, Jr. 

Let’s have another story by Stanley G. Wein- 
baum about Ham and Pat. The Lotus Eaters 
and Parasite Planet were both extremely inter- 


ing. 

Before I close I want to tell you that I enjoy 
the editorials a lot. Best of luck.—Douglas E. 
_ Blakely, 4516 Edina Blvd., Minneapolis, Minne- 
sota. 


Welcome! 


Dear Editor: 

Allow me, as a new Brass Tacker, to com- 
pliment you on the fine magazine you have in 
Astounding Stories. I started to read Astound- 
ing Stories with the first issue, but dropped it 
soon after because it was literally dying on its 
feet. When I heard that Street Smith was 
taking it over, I immediately started to read 
it again, and have been ever since. 

Your stories, in my opinion, are all excellent 
and well written, although I will say that a 
few have fallen short of the Astounding Stories 
standard. Yeur thought-varient scheme has 
really brought out some novel and thought- 
prenios stories, such as in the August issue: 

Galactic Circle, The Upper Level Road, 
8ter That Wouldn’t Behave, and Twelve Eighty- 
. All were splendidly written and in- 
tensely interesting. 
author of Upper Level Road can make 
& swell series of stories from his idea. Let’s 
have a sequel to this one. 

Your paper and edges are O. K. with me, 
as are your wire staples—three boos for Mr. 
Tucker. Every one praises artist Dold; well, 
he is fine, but his human beings are sometimes 
out of proportion, and some are positively evil 

ing. The covers are plain and conservative. 

Some of the letters in Brass Tacks make me 
sick, others are humorous. I quite agree with 
Mr. Welch in the August issue. This idea of 
bickering, and slamming—often in a profane 
tone—is all nonsense. If every one would 
think twice before they wrote their letters, they 
could put more sense in them. After all, fel- 
lows, the life of an editor is not a life of 
ease. He is trying to please everybody, which 
you realize is very difficult. 

Seience fiction is over nine years old, and all 
stories now written revolve around an idea that 
was put on paper years ago. The “new policy” 
and “thought-variant’’ schemes have, in a meas- 
ure, brought out some new ideas, but very few 
Teally new ones. So, come on, fellows, instead 
of always slamming the editor in the face, why 
not give him some pats on the back. He made 
Astounding Stories what it is to-day, brought 
it from the bottom to the top. More stories, 
better authors, more pages, better illustrations, 
all for twenty cents? That is a bargain. 

is is my first letter to Astounding Stories, 
Mr. Editor. Do you think you will have room 
for it in Brass Tacks? I hope so. Possibly 

t I have said will make some other “‘Tackers” 
think sanely next time they write. 

Please be assured of my continued patronage 
and accept my wishes for your continued suc- 


.—Wm. G. Dexter, 643 East 127th Street, 
Cleveland, Ohio. 


TACKS 


Tastes Differ! 


Dear Editor: 
I’ve noticed quite a few letters in Brass Tacks 

lately concerning the amount of science a 

science-fiction story should contain. 

Tastes differ in everything including science 
fiction, but I think most of your readers prefer 
stories with the science cut to a minimum— 
just enough to make the story plausible. The 
Brass Tackers in the thick of the Van Kampen 
controversy, will probably not agree, they seem 
to prefer science with a little fiction thrown in 
for good measure. 

To support my claims, compare The Legion 
Of Space, The Mightiest Machine, and T 
Skylark Of Valeron. The Legion Of Space con- 
tained about one-tenth the science of the other 
two _ stories, and, with the possible exception 
of Rebirth, was the greatest story yet published 
in Astounding Stories. Remember the all- 
powerful AKKA that destroyed the Medusa of 
Yarkland? Williamson did not mar his story 
by describing in minutest detail how this force 
operated. 

Can’t you see Smith or Campbell grinding out 
page after page of descriptive and explanative 
data for the reader to wade through before 
the story gets anywhere? They both write 
interesting stuff, but until they cut out some 
of the tedious parts, their stories will never be 

reat. Which reminds me of The Avatar I just 

nished—two solid pages of chemical equations, 

reading like a textbook in college chemistry. 
That’s what your readers mean by too much 
science. 

How does Gallun do it? Sons of famous 
fathers seldom equal their dad's reputation, but 
The Son Of Old Faithful certainly did. That’s 
the best story of the year so far. Menace From 
Saturn was also excellent, there were enough 
ideas in it to have stretched it into a novelette. 

Mr. Ellissen called Brown’s covers blatant 
and advised you to get Paul. What a laugh! 
If Brown's covers are blatant, there is no word 
that can hope to describe Paul’s eye-shocking 
work. E 

I see Taine’s serial ends next month. 


From 
the looks of the illustrations it should be good. 
I hope the new serial is by Williamson, another 
like The Legion of Space. 

It would be better to issue a semimonthly or 


a quarterly than a sister magazine. Keepin 
two magazines, featuring the same type 0! 
fiction up to a high standard is very difficult. 
Yours for a continued great Astounding Stories. 
—Richard H. Hamison, 5141 Dresden Avenue, 
St. Louis, Missouri. 


Explanation! 


Dear Editor: 

I was about to write a nasty letter, in answer 
to some fans who write in to Brass Tacks and 
criticize authors and writers of letters unfairly, 
but Hubert Allcock of New Jersey has taken 
the words out of my mouth. I want to tell 
Willis Conover, Jr., of Washington, D. C., that 
he did not get the point in the story, Set Your 
Course by the Stars. 

Here is what I mean, Willis. Mr. Binder, 
in that story, did not mean that the reflected 
light from the stars was making space whirl, 
but that there were so many stars visible that 
black space was not visible between them. In 
other words, each star seemed crowded upon its 
neighbor. I hope this helps you get a clearer 
understanding of the idea under the story. 

Oh, ye! editor, I’m glad to see that you have 
secured Haggard to entertain us. This month’s 
cover reminds me of the old Astounding Stories, 
lurid-eye attraction and (hohroho) red space. 
Please give us some news as to how the semi- 
monthly argument is coming out, and, most of 
all, will we have a big quarterly? With every 
issue, our magazine is forging steadily farther 
and farther ahead of its rivals. The Upper 
Level Road in this issue demands a sequel, and 


156 


if we don’t get one, ssssssssssss, my ray gun will 
get you. 

I’ve done enough broadcasting in this letter, 
80 this is Space Ship No. 1423-S, signing off.— 
Lyman Martin, 65 Howe St., Mariboro, Mass. 


Titanic Happenings! 


Dear Editor: 
Some of the letters in Brass Tacks of the 
August issue were very interesting. H. H. 
Welsh slammed practically everything con- 
nected, even remotely, with science fiction. 
Hubert Allcock squeezed Kaletsky between his 
thumb and forefinger. Donald Wolikeim dis- 
closed high treason and treachery in Bob 
“Dictator’ Tucker’s SPWSSTFM. Truly a 
month of titanic happenings! P 
Jack Williamson’s story brought back some- 
thing that had been missing since the end of 
The Legion of Space. The other stories were 
great also. The Son Of Redmask was a pleas- 
ant surprise indeed. By the way, when are we 
going to have another story by Stanley Wein- 
baum? Soon, I hope. 
still waiting for that announcement 
that you will publish a big, juicy 
quarterly. The semimonthly plan is good, but 
1 like the quarterly idea better. It would not 
involve that risk of lowering Astounding’s high 
standard with regard to stories. Another thing, 
I noticed almost every reader who appeared in 
Brass Tacks asked that you go semimonthly and 
also publish a quarterly. Here’s hoping. 
Whatever happens, I hope you don’t try to 
imitate the old Astounding too much. A little 
adventure is quite all right. Menace From 
Saturn, and similar stories are good reading and 
I like them, but I hope you don’t heed the 
readers who want you to change the entire 
Magazine over to the blood-and-thunder type. 
Keep Astounding hitched to that star.— 
L. P. Wakefield, 2832 Marchall Way, Sacra 
mento, California. 


Best Yet! 


Dear Editor: 

I enjoyed the August issue of Astounding very 
much. It is, undoubtedly, the best you have 
published so far. H. V. Brown’s cover was 
excellent, and the fact that he possesses an 
unusually fertile imagination is obvious. This 
month’s painting is his best effort to date. 

The story it illustrated was excellent, too, 
not only for the unique idea behind it, but also 
because of the picturesque descriptions and life- 
like characterizations it contained. For that 
matter, has a Williamson story ever appeared 
in Astounding that was anything short of ex- 
cellent? 

Rebellion was a fitting sequel to The Machine 
and The Invaders. Don Stuart has a very 
refreshing style of narration. By the way, what 
about that promised sequel to Twilight, Stuart’s 
crowning achievement? 

The Son Of Redmask lacked that vital some- 
thing that was so evident in Redmask of the 
Outiands. It was only fair reading. 

The short stories were all very good, espe- 
cially The Star That Would Not Behave, Man 
of Iron, and Lost In Space, a very good study 
ef human character, by . Harvey Haggard. 
I’m glad to see that he’s finally arrived in 
Astounding. 

I'm also glad to see that you’re finally allow- 
ing mere than one illustration to the longer 
stories, but I do wish you'd let Elliot Dold 
filustrate the entire magazine. He's the best 
interior illustrator ever to draw for any science- 
fiction magazine. 

Turning to Brass Tacks, we find a curious 
letter from one, . H. Welch, who evidently 
does not think very highly of this particular 
type of fiction. It’s certainly a pity that he 
hhasn’t enough intelligence to enjoy such fasci- 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


I admire him though, for ‘hig 
fra . even though his opinions are 
guiged. For his information, a certain science 
ction magazine has a circulation of almost 
twenty-five thousand copies per month. I'll bet 
Mr. Welch receives one of Hubert Alicock’g 
“cute little notes.” Do a good job on him, 
Hubert, ol’ kid. Incidentally, that’s a nice, 
interesting letter you wrote Mr. Allcock; which 
is more than I can say for my drivel. 

I see that the September issue will complete 
your second year under the Street & Smith 
banner. You can expect another letter from me 
then, telling you what my impressions are, and 
listing your best stories and authors. 

Robert Y. Zachary, of Washington, 
communicate with me. When he wrote to 

in answer to my letter in the June Astounding, 
he forgot to give his address.—Corwin Stickney, 
Jr., 28 Dawson St., Belleville, N. J. 


nating literature. 
ra 


High Standing! 


Dear Editor: 

I wish to thank you very much for printing 
my last letter in Brass Tacks. I write this in 
hopes that it, too, shall find its way into that 
column. 

It is too bad that Taine’s Twelve Lighty-Seven 
has to take up valuable space in Astounding 
Stories. It certainly is not astounding, and is 
not the science-fiction type at all: Taine should 
have taken it to some adventure or war-stery 
magazine, rather than Astounding. 

bought a copy of one of your contemporaries’ 
magazines lately, chiefly because I saw, “Now— 
15e” flashed all over the page. I was curious 
to see what change had occurred in the lowering 
of the price. It was just as I thought it would 
be. The stories were worse than ever. The 
only two good features that magazine has now 
is the club and the editorial note at the bottom 
of each letter printed in their reader’s column. 
By the way, when is Astounding going to have 
the much-wanted editorial note? 

Ramon F. Alverez del Rey’s letter in the 
August issue was a feature all by itself. It 
showed a great amount of intelligence and 
power of observance on the writer's part. 
hope that, in the future, Mr. Clyde C. Campbell 
will be careful not to use expressions like 
“isotope of water’ in his stories. Please leave 
those silly letters by Tucker and Wollheim out 
of Brass Tacks. After all, that worthy column 
should be for serious discussion, not humor(?). 

I wish Mr. R. R. Winterbotham would ex- 
plain in greater detail, in Brass Tacks, what 
he means by “seeing the solar system as it was 
millions of years ago.’ How could such a 
thing be possible, Mr. Winterbotham? I await 
your explanation of that occurrence quoted from 
your, Star That Would Not Behave. : 

Meanwhile, dear editor, may Astounding 
Stories keep its present high standing.—Willis 
Conover, Jr., 2800 Wisconsin Ave., No., Wash- 
ington, D. C 


Sequels Surpass! 


Dear Editor: 

The August issue was more or less dedicated 
to sequels. Both of the sequels surpassed their 
predecessors which, it seems to me, is unusual. 

Congratulations on procuring The Galactic 
Circle, by Jack Williamson. 

In The Phantem Dictator, when Dr. Brown 
went to see the President, he said that Willy 
Pan had suggested sharing the nation's wealth. 
The only Willy Pan cartoon Dr. Brown had 
seen was The Magician, and although ‘Willy did 
suggest that plan it was not supposed to have 
had an effect on the conscious minds of the 
listeners. it did have no effect on the mind of 
Dr. Brown because he withstood the hypnotic 


BRASS TACKS 


effects of Willy’s wand, but every one else in 
the country who had seen Willy had succumbed 
so they could not remember what Willy had 
gaid at the last. Therefore, would not the 
President have become suspicious and would 
he not have ordered Dr. Brown thrown in jail? 

Now Mr. Conover, Jr., a word to you. We 
gee because light of certain wave lengths im- 
inges on the retina of our eye and the image 
gs transferred to the brain. There need be no 
gas between the body emitting and the body re- 
ceiving the light. The thing Eando Binder was 
trying to get at was that space is so filled with 
stars that no matter which direction you look 
you would see a solid mass of them, not be- 
eause they are close together, but because they 
are nearly in line. We do not get that effect 
on Earth because our atmosphere blocks the 
light of the fainter stars. Also I would advise 
you to look up the meaning of the word “bi- 
monthly.” 

Why, oh why, doesn’t somebody print a fan- 
tasy magazine so we can get rid of the kickers 
who find some science in the stories. 

And now, after many laborious years of study 
and work, I have found the reason that the 
readers pine for the “good old days.” It’s this 
way—the science was so scarce in those days 
that when one did find some it gave him a 
feeling of exaltation which is lacking to-day. 
Maybe a fantasy magazine would fill that need, 


00. 

And as for the blasphemous propaganda you 
allow to be spread in Brass Tacks by that 
fiend in grand exalted booleywag’s clothing, Don- 
ald Wollheim, what right has he to raise his 
hand against that greatest of all dictators, Bob 
Tucker? Even now I am preparing a booklet 
which is to be put together with chewing gum. 
Yes, wire staples are just about a thing of the 
past. We will soon have an international law 
—written in Esperanto—causing all users or 
owners of wire staples to be put to death. 
So, beware, editor. 

Why not have a cover something like the 
August issue, but with no written matter on it, 
on some future issue? Who could resist open- 
ing it to see what it was, and having opened 
it who could resist looking through it, and 
having looked through it who could resist read- 
ing it, and having read it who could resist buy- 
ing another, and having bought another who 
could resist—or maybe I’m wrong.—Frank 
Driggers, Quarter 22, Fort Douglas, Utah. 


Three Cheers! 


Dear Editor: 

You seem to have cornered all the leading 
science-fiction writers with the exception of the 
one who is the greatest of them all. You know 
who I mean, § Lovecraft. He’s the one 
and only and is better than Kline, Burroughs, 
Cummings, E. E. Smith, John W. Campbell, Jr., 
or any other popular author. I feel that 
Astounding lacks something without this mas- 
ter of fantasy. You claim he writes weird fiction 
exclusively, but there really isn’t a very dis- 
tinct borderline between the two fields. science 
and weird fiction. So let’s see H. P. Lovecraft. 
the fantasy writer, added to Astounding’s list of 
authors. 

Of the authors you have writing for you at 
present, I like Frank Belknap Long, Jr., about 
the best. Last-man stories are always in- 
triguing, and his are the créme de la créme—the 
cat’s pajamas, in other words. How about some 
longer stories by Mr. Long, a novel or a novel- 
ette, perhaps? I’ll bet he could write a great 
thought-variant. Donald Wandrel is another 
excellent writer. 

Astounding Stories is far better than either 
of its competitors, so keep up the good work. 
And hang on to your wire staples. 
cheers for the IAOPUMUMFSTFPUSA!!! 

Well, here’s hoping to see Lovecraft in 
Astounding’s pages, and more from Frank Bel- 
knap Long. Jr.—Ralph Harnser. 


Three-dimensional Effect! 


Dear Editor: 

Whether Wallace West, in The Phantom Dic- 
tator in the August issue, wrote from actual 
knowledge or from imagination, I do not know. 
In regard to the motion-picture cartoon in the 
story, he writes: “But it was the background 
in which the creature moved that intrigued me 
most. Not only was the picture presented in 


natural colors, but by a new advance in screen 
—s it had a lifelike three-dimensional 
ect.” 


It may be of interest to Mr. West—should 
he be ignorant of the fact—and to your readers, 
that a good many of the forthcoming Holly- 
wood cartoons have actually attained a seem- 
ingly three-dimensional effect. This apparent 
depth is obtained by using miniature sets in 
the background, and the illusion is further cre- 
ated by the contrast with the ordinary drawn 
comic characters appearing in the foreground. 

Allow me to say that I have always held the 
view that the editor of any magazine should 
run his publication to please himself—regardless 
of readers’ opinions to the contrary. That is, of 
course, with the exception of ‘Dictator’ 
Tucker’s suggestions, for any one must realize 
that the age of the wire staple is rapidly de- 
clining. 

I should be glad to hear from any Astounding 
readers interested in _ science-fiction films.— 
z ue Lichtig, 6455 Hayes Drive, Hollywood, 
alif. 


Up to Standard! 


Dear Editor: 

Thanks for the August issue. As much of 
it as I’ve read seems to be up to standard. 
The story, The Star That Would Not Behave, 
has me tangled. As the author explains it, the 
star and its system were not really here but 
merely the light waves given off by our own 
sun countless light years ago. These waves 
had traveled around the universe, and had 
either met the Earth where it started or half- 
way in its circumuniversal journey. And the 
star is going only “between fifty and sixty 
miles per second.” Now wouldn’t this star 
seem to be approaching at the speed of light. 
either plus or minus the few miles per second 
that our system moves? What I mean is this: 

As the author explains it. the star is not 
here in person, but only as a visible image of 
light. It should therefore seem to be moving 
at the speed of light. It might have gone 
forward in the direction that our system is 
moving, or it might have been reflected the 
other way, so as to meet us head-on. In one 
case it weuld be going a few miles per second 
more than the speed of light—in relation to 
the Earth—and so couldn’t possibly be seen 
coming. And after it has passed, it and the 
Earth would be drawing apart at a little more 
than the speed of light, so it couldn’t be seen 
leaving. We might glimpse it for that in- 
finitesimal fraction of a second while it is 
directly abreast of us, neither visibly coming 
nor going. Or if it came upon us from the 
rear, it would be moving nearly as fast as light 
—in relation to us—but not quite,.as we would 
be moving away slightly. Then after passing 
us it would continue on at the same speed 
relatively. It could be under observation for 
at most, a few hours. But the author makes 
it three years. Won't some kind reader come to 
the rescue of my unenlightened self on this 
subject ? 

Now for your readers. That’s what I wrote 
this letter for anyway. 

Public enigma No. 1: Mr. H. H. Welch, who 
rates first place among Brass Tackers. Another 
Kaletsky in our midst! For your I-dare-you-to- 
print-this attitude labels you as merely another 
crank. What do you read it for, if you con- 
sider science-fiction so vile, inane, imbecilic, 


158 


ete.? You probably ‘have partial basis for that 
ent, but it is a little too all-inctusive. 

I have read some oes stories in scientific- 
fiction magazines, I would hesitate ‘to pass 
t on the field of science fiction 

So severely, without giving some definite proof. 

You ridicule the noble efforts in our Brass 
Tacks. In most cases these letters honestly 
express the writers’ opinions, and are not in- 
tended for wit or droflery. In a few cases, e. g. 
the Wollheim-Tucker battle of the millennium, 
t are carrying on a battle of wits—or other- 
wise—in an endeavor to please and amuse the 
— They are the spice of the whole maga- 
zine. 

Also, Mr. Welch, it is fair and aboveboard 
to use humor or light ridicule as a weapon of 
defense or offense in these columns, but such 
ae sarcasm as yours is scarcely permissible. 

pe Pe should never make such self-committing 

idly accusing charges without being pre- 

—— # to back up your opinions with fact. I 
presume the H. H. stands for “hard-hitting.” 

Second: Private to Bleomington’s Huey Long, 
keep up the geod work. Although you never 
say anything really worth reading—thought- 

variant, I mean—still you relieve much mo- 
notony. “ You and Wollheim are really interest- 
ing, even if you do gain it at the price of a 
reputation for idiocy and incoherent ravings. 

Third: Hubert Allicock’s literary achieve- 
ment should have been listed on the title page. 
I consi it as sound and interesting as any 
story. A letter like that is not merely a com- 
munication, it is an unassailable essay. 

Fourth: Miss Hook. Hurrah. By hook or 
by crook, somebody has at last found the cour- 
age to defend good old Charles Fort. That 
letter contained a good rebuke to those who are 
too jaay to think seriously about the possibilities 
ti) 


: Willis Conover kicks at Set Your 

by the Stars His argument is hard 
to dispose, as it doesn’t prove anything itself. 
He says that when light hits something, you can 
see it. Granted. And that when there is noth- 
ing for it to ‘hit, you can’t see it. Also granted. 
Then he says that the man in the ship could not 
have seen all those stars. Well, I say he could 

se, as Willie should grant, the light 
waves are there, even if there isn’t anything to 
hit. When the man looks that way, the waves 
enter his eyes via the pupils, thereby hitting 
semething, and consequently rendering them 
visible. That is, as Willie proves, he doesn’t 
see the light waves themselves, but he does see 
the stars on which they originated, because the 
waves hit the retina of the eye and are changed 
from light to sensation, which reaches the brain 
and tells him there are stars in the sky. Mr. 
Conover evidently believed that the whiteness 
was caused by the man seeing these waves side- 
wise as they went past, while the author meant 
that he saw the waves endwise, as is natural. 
Or does this sound too disjointed? Willis, if 
you want to argue this more thoroughly, why 
don’t you come over and see me sometime? I 
won't take the initiative, but if you want to 
write, I'll guarantee to answer. 

Sixth: Ramon, etc., of Washington, D. C., 
Congratulations for showing C. C. Campbell the 
difference between elements and compounds. 
I’ve only taken a year of chemistry, and didn’t 
do any too good in it, you bet, but when he 
talks of “isotopes of water’ and heavy water as 

I foam at the mouth. No kidding. 
been properly chastised, so that’s 


Seventh: Ackermann turned in the useful 
ul criticism and his column was as edifying 
quietly interesting as ever. 

1, Beventh-and.s- half: I see you put Wollheim 

He now ranks 15th out of a 
posse Pon "hacker was 5th! Cheer up, Wolly, 
always save the best for the last anyway. 

A few last comments: Your cover’s O. K.; 
stories — Re ie aged Ey Tacks hard to 
_ Pead—type rn; and how —_ = = 

editorial Fe Bob echoed, “120 West Martin, Elm 
Washington. 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


More Science! 


Dear Editor: 
I am this aguestumy of writing te 
ve you my opinion of Astounding Stories, te 
uly issue in particular. 
The Son Of Old Faithful, by Raymond Z% 
py ~ was 4 fitting sequel to its predecessor, 
Old Paithful, but I should not call 


rting-of point, a “thought-variant,” for 
surely a rocket would expend the same energy 
in escaping from the Earth whether it wag 
heading for the moon or for Mars 

I notice that one reader, Henry Bott, kicked 
against science in your stories. I must protest 
against this; give us more science. Mind you, 
I don’t blame him for kicking against authors 
who squeeze a scientific text book into one 
chapter, as did C. C. Campbell in The Avatar, 
The scientific facts should be spread out, and 
should be so intermixed with the story that 
they cannot be separated. 

I understand that you are contemplating 
issuing a companion journal to be devoted te 
the more adventurous type of science fiction, 
If you do, I, for one, will not buy it. I came 
across a copy of one of the former publishers 
Astounding Stories, and believe me, it was vile_ 

With regard to Murray’s Light, by Donald 
Wandrei in the June issue, I recently read the 
Tt nee in a scientific periodical; 
“Light bulbs that glow continuously for 
months without electric current to light the 
filaments may be used for illumination in the 
future. This prediction was made recently by 
Prof. Charles T. Knipp before the Americas 
Physical Society, after he had outlined his ex 
periments with a bulb filled with nitrogen gaa 
Afterglow from this lamp has given light for 
as long as three hours after it had been charged 
with an electric flash for one tenth of a second 
Brilliance of these lamps was found to incre: 
rather than decrease, over a certain period 
time.” 

In conclusion, may I inform your readers 
that I am the secretary of an international 
scientific correspondence society, details of 
which I will be pleased to send to any one 
interested. 

ep | that forthcoming stories will main- 
tain the high standard of the magazine, I re 
main, Yours sinecerely—Douglas W. Mayer, 
_ Park Road, Roundhay, Leeds 8, Eng- 


Take Out the Wire Staples! 


Dear Editor: 

I have kept my trap shut so far, but that 
letter ~ 3 that great uphoider of science-fiction, 
H. elch, just makes my pen, typewriter, 


and i want to wiggle. 
Sir —— starts out by subtly placing him 


self in the class of cultivated mind and 

thereby gustan Se rest of us a bunch of Bowery 
bums. him for the compliment, for is 
not a single hint from those great lips of his 
a tt: pean whether it be an honor or 8 


,» ay he accuses us of being judges’ of 
science-fiction, and yet he goes ahead and pre 
claims himself a judge of literature, and passes 
personal judgment upon science-fiction. 

May I ask if he by any chance had studied 
science-fiction, or has he read one story in some 
paper or magazine, and thereupon based his 
judgment on that? 

I also see that he likes our tickling humor, 
and to that I say you must take into con 
tion that we-are not humorists, but 
scientific-fiction addicts who try to lend o 
ity to our letters. 

stly, ask what would the Honorable 
Welch have us read who like stories oo thaa 
those of the every day world? Maybe 
su, t fairy tales. 
ow that that is off my chest, I shall process 
to tell you what I think of the magazine I 


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BRASS TACKS 159 


udly and defiantly wave at the Honorable 


ich. 

Firstly, editor, don’t go semimonthly, because 
I would have four magazines to buy instead of 
three, and I would soon go bankrupt. 

seocnaly. why not answer the letters in Brass 

ks 
™, hirdly, even though the menacing shadows 
of Wollheim’s cutthroats hover over me I say 
perts to him and Welch and please take out the 
wire staples. - 

Fourthly, I have no kick on the stories, cover 

edges. In other words keep up the good 
work but take out the staples. 

Lastly, I have said enough for a fourteen- 
ld so I shall only add print this in Brass 
or throw it away but take out the wire 

staples in Astounding. I believe I have made 
clear.—John Crockett, 327 Sarah Avenue, 
Falls, Iowa. 


Happy Medium! 


Dear Editor : 

Though I have been a reader of Astounding 
Stories since January, 1931, this is my first 
letter to Brass Tacks. Even now, as several 
years ago, there’s comment on the type of 

mn our magazine. Some say _ there’s 
‘ much science and not enough fiction, while 
@thers say there’s too much fiction and not 
_ @novgh science. So, Mr. Editor, I think you'd 
@o well to keep the magazine at its present 
happy medium. Most of the stories aren’t too 
seientific for me to understand, and besides 
being interesting and enjoyable, they are, in a 
way, educational as well. I’ve certainly learned 

a let from some of them. 

I wish more girls would write in to Brass 
Tacks. A few of them used to several years 
ago, but were given the royal razzberry by 
some of the opposite sex, and I guess have been 
rather hesitant about writing in ever since. 

on, girls, don’t be bashful! 

Mr. Editor, I believe half of the success of 

magazine is due to the colorful and interest- 
covers. That’s what caught my eye 
first saw it on the news stand. 

I'd be interested in corresponding with any 
one interested in amateur radio. Best wishes to 
Astounding Stories.—Vivian L. Pritchett, P. O. 
Box 415, Mountain View, California. 


A List to Consider! 


Dear Editor : 

i am very much pleased with the July 
Astounding. The two previous issues had led 
me to expect at least a slight let-down, but 
instead I find an array of truly excellent 


ies. 
Twelve Eighty-Seven is a great story. It is 
diferent from your previous serials, yet it is as 


good in its way as they were in theirs. It is 
& relief to read an occasional story of this type. 
I've been looking forward to Hamilton's ap- 


eee between your covers, and what a story 
gives us! It easily takes first place in the 
issue. Why wasn’t The Accursed G 
labeled “thought-variant” ? It certainly de- 
served that description. And the recent Set 
Your Course By The Stars was truly thought- 
variant also. he Far Way is a tremendously 
intriguing and beautifully written story. 

liquid Power is excellent, save for slight 
touches of amateurishness. 

The Avatar is a splendid story, but is marred 

about a half page of unintelligible scientific 
data which seemed dragged in for the purpose 

showing the writer's knowledge of science. 

As for The Son Of Old Faithful, I cannot 
fay that it is as good as the original. However, 

a fine story. I have not as yet read the 

other stories in’ the current number. 

I don’t think much of your recent covers. 
Tm a Wesso fan. Also your new interior 
artist is not so good. Who is he? 


There are a number of writers who wrote for 
the old Astounding Stories who would be wel- 
come additions to your staff of authors. When 

a He y. Mason writes another yarn like 
Phalanzes Of Atlans, don’t fail to snap it up. 
Let’s have something by Victor Rousseau, if he 
can equal The Atom-Smasher. I should like 
a story by Arthur J. Burks if it were as good 
as Earth The Marauder, or one by S. P. Meek 
like Giants on the Earth. Anthony Gilmore 
could surely approximate those gripping tales 
The Affair of the Brains and The Passing of 
Ku Siu, and S. P. Wright should be able to 
give us one like The Forgotten Planet or The 
Dark Side of Antri. 

You might let Harl Vincent revive his Vage- 
bonds Of Space. A good series or twe adds to 
the interest in the magazine without the dis- 
advantage of serials. 

Finally, let me say that, although I like 
humor in the Brass Tacks department, I do not 
care for the feeble attempts at such on the part 
of Bob Tucker and others. I hope they soon 
cease to bore us. Of course, I prefer smooth 
= Allgeier, Mountain Grove, Mis- 
souri. 


Comfort! 


Dear Editor: 

Although I am rather young, I have been a 
reader of science-fiction for about seven years, 
and I have found it a great comfort to be able 
to get away from the ordinary run of fiction 
and read something new in stories by capable 
writers. 

To get down to business, the reason I wrote 
you is the unspeakably childish letter of Mr. 
H. H. Welch. This writer must be, I thought, 
similar to the type of child who wants attention 
so badly that he will say anything to receive 
it. As my judgment upon him I shall quote to 
him a part of Mr. Hubert Allcock’s letter 
printed in the same issue. August. 

Mr. Welch, “you are merely a small ladybug! 
You do not bite! You do not irritate. You 
merely tickle. I have no desire to crush or 
harm you. I shall scratch you gently, for you 
are a gentleman ladybug. Please pick up your 
marbles and fiy home.” 

That's all for Mr. Welch. 
editor. 

Mr. Editor, I believe that Astounding Stories, 
with you at the helm, has made history. The 
‘greatest epics of modern science-fiction have 
graced your pages, and there is every evidence 
that your standard will not be lowered. Such 
stories as Rebirth, the greatest piece of modern 
science-fiction ; The Skylark Of Valeron, another 
incomparable Skylark story from the able pen 
of Dr. Smith: and The Mightiest Machine, ex- 
celled only by the aforementioned two—not to 
mention such stories as The Warriors Of Eter- 
nity and The Galactic Circle, or the innumer- 
able short stories, not equaled by any other 
magazine—have made your magazine the best 
of its kind on the news stands. 

Before closing, I would like to venture a few 
criticisms of the magazine, which you may do 
with as you see fit. First, as I am one of those 
persons who read from cover to cover, I am 
often left with a bad taste in my mouth as a 
result of the réading of one of those incom- 
parably idiotic letters of Mr. Tucker and his 
enemy in crime, Mr. Wollheim. As I am, I 
believe, an average reader, I assume that others 
have felt the same emotions upon finishing the 
drivel they hand out. In my opinion I can 
indicate my contempt for them by a loud long 
humph preduced, in case you don’t know, by 
rapidly exhaling the air from my lungs through 
my nose and mouth. Please use Brass Tacks 
for intelligent discussion only. am alse in 
favor of a quarterly and a size suitable for bind- 
ing. I suppose you will not print this, but if 
for some unfathomable reason it finds a berth 
in Brass Tacks I may write again sometime 
and expound my pet theories to all who care to 
read.— William L. Hathaway, 508 North 14th 
Street, Kansas City, Kansas. 


Now for the 


160 


Brass Tacks’ Record! 


Dear Bditor : 

I was walking through town one day and 
witnessed an amusing incident which I thought. 
would interest you, so here it is: 

Time: Saturday night. 

Plaee: Corner news stand. 

Characters: Astounding Stories, a dime 
novel and a _ scienee-fiction fan. 

Dime Novel trying to get a wink of sleep. 
Astounding Stories, feeling lively, making a 
loud raeket whistling and singing (roar of 
rocket motors and hissing of rays). 

Dime Novel, in irritated voice: For Pete’s 
sake, can the noise and let a guy sleep! 

Astounding, with a couple of extra loud roars 
and explosions: Whoopee! I can’t help mak- 
ing all this racket. That noise you hear is the 
new liquid power Don Morrow has invented 
and is trying out in his new space ship. 
Whoopee, hear it go! It’s the most remarkable 


thing I have ever seen! 

mm 8: Phooey! you science-fiction books 
make me get disgusted! 

A. S., cutting down the noise and gazing in 
wonderment : hy? 

D. N., shrieking: Why? Look at all those 
insane, impossible stories you are fed with! 


Heh! It’s a wonder you don’t explode and 
disintegrate, with all the murderous weapons 
and rays you carry! 

A. 8., puzzled: But how can anything happen 
to me? BEver since I remember, I have been 
doing the same work am now and see no 
harm in it. In fact it’s so exciting, hearing 
new ideas and meeting new people—like Stuart, 
the time traveler, and that queer Martian, 
Old Faithful’s child, No. 775, and—— 

D. N., breaking in: That’s it! Those crazy, 
impossible ideas! You never contain any sane 
stories like I do! Good, everyday adventures 
that don’t leave one dizzy, wondering what it’s 
all about after they read them, like your stories 
do. I ask you! Do half of the people who 
your stories really know what it’s all 
about? No, I say! How can they when they 
ars used to reading the adventures I specialize 


A. S., suddenly silent and thoughtful: I—I— 
never really thought of it like that 
D. N., sereaming: Of course you wouldn’t! 
How could you? When your mind is full of 
your own importance? Too full to think of 


others! 
A. S., in a small voice: But I always meant 
to do right. I always thought I was helping 


to add to people’s knowledge by bringing new 
ideas into their reach—perhaps I may be a little 
too deep for some people, but What about 
your stories? They aren’t real either so why 
upbraid me? 

D. N., puffing with pride: No, they may not 
be true but they are so much more logical that 
they appeal more readily than yours do, to 
most people. Er—ah—more people read me 
than they do you, heh, heh! 

A. S., in a_ thoughtful voice: Perhaps it’s 
because they don’t know me well enough 

D. N.: Phooey! Pst—here comes some one! 
I'll bet he chooses me before you! 

Eyes glared through dark-rimmed spectacles 
belonging to a portly gentleman, fat fingers 
reached out and clutched D. N. around the 
middle, pages flipped rapidly while the eyes 
glared at the contents. 

D. N., writhing in agony: O oww!. He 
might be a bit more gentle with me. His 
thumb is digging an inch into my stomach! 
Ooww! 

Plop! D. N. falls back into his place, some- 
what bedraggied in appearance. 

D. N., Taging: Phooey! He doesn’t know 
a good book when he sees one! 

Fat fingers grab A. S. 
interested as pages are scanned. One 
hand places A. 8S. under an arm while the 
other reaches into a jinglinc pocket. 

A. 8., triumphantly to D. N.: Well, old pal, 


Bespectacled eyes 


ASTOUNDING STORIES 


4 


good-by! It was pleasant to know you. 
very pleasant to meet such a popular chap. 

to sleep and don’t brag so. .Perhaps you'll have 
better luck next time! 

D. N., shrieking with rage as A. S disappear” 
around the corner: Are you trying to insinuate” 
that I was bragging ‘ 

Well, editor, since, I*am here I may as wal” 
report that I have a couple dozen people rea i-4 
Astounding Stories who didn’: know of ds 
existence till I started my campaign. vs 

I enjoyed all the stories in the July issue: 
Twelve Eighty-Seven has me on needles : 
pins waiting for the rest. 

The Brass Tacks department this month, + 
is a record. I got a big kick out_of_ most 
the letters, especially the one by E. E. § 
Has the “keeper’’ Mr. Wilson mentioned, loeat 
the ‘staple nut’ Tucker yet? To bring 
back to sanity, Mr. Editor, I would suggest @ 
you mail him a special magazine with extra 
sharp thumb tacks inserted in place of 


staples. The sharp jab he would receive, whilt 
trying to dig out his imaginary chewing gum) 
would bring him back to normal. 


gave plenty of people something to worry al 

I’m for you, Mr. van Kampen, and don’t 
up the ship—rocket! 

Well, I shall leave now, Mr. HEditor, 
some other time. Lots of luck with your : 
—Miss Ethel Poppe, Box 727, West Brownsvil 
Penna. 


Taking a Crack at it! 


Dear Editor: 
It seems to be the order of the day for all 
the readers to suggest the authors they'd, like 
to see in A. S., so I might as well take a crack 
What about D. H. Keller and 8. K 

of them can do stuff more satis 


Both 
whoever he 


factorily than David R. Daniels, 


may be. Wishing you the best of luck for future 
issues.—P. W. Wyatt. 


Insinuation? 


Dear Editor: 

May I congratulate the magazine on its really 
beautiful story by Hamilton about the ee py 
Monad, in the evolving galaxy? Persons of suf- 
ficient intelligence will recognize in this stery & 
classic for the ages. Its place in fiction is as 
sured by the clever part where the reporter dis 
plays almost human intelligence twice in 
same week.—F. A. Proctor, Brielle, N. J. 


Letter Limit, Too? 


Dear Editor: 

I skipped a month in writing but not in read- 
ing this magazine, so don’t despair. Whether 
you believe me or not I always turn to the 
editor’s page before reading anything else be 
cause it is like traveling into the future. 

Mr. Editor, is there some way in which the 
readers could send in a ballot for a purpose 
voting on a word limit so that more reader® 
could get their letters in Brass Tacks? [If there 
is, let us know by printing your answer on the — 
editor’s page. 

The Juiy and August issues of Astounding ate © 
very good, excellent and tops, all in one. ft 
see we have Rédmask back with us again, am 
other achievement. Believe me, I sure am look 
ing and waiting for next month's Astou 
Please unscramble this letter, and put it 
Brass Tacks.—Ross Wilson, Jr., R. F. D. & 


Box 89, Chesterfield, Mo. 
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|